Lloyd Alexander, Contributing Author

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Lloyd Alexander

Author of The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Chudley Alexander won the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal. As a member of Cricket’s Editorial Advisory Board, he became the voice of Old Cricket for the monthly feature “Old Cricket Says”.

In Celebrate Cricket: 30 years of stories and art, Trina Schart Hyman remarks that Alexander supported her idea to create a bug comic strip for the magazine, and convinced others of the idea, inaugurating what would become an iconic element.

Born in 1924, Alexander grew up in the Drexel Hill suburb of Philadelphia. After graduating from Upper Darby High School in 1940, Alexander worked for a bank in Philadelphia and attended a semester of college before volunteering for military service.

The landscape, language, castles, and folklore of Wales, where Alexander spent part of his service, would later inspire a number of his books. While serving in France before his discharge, he met and married Parisian Janine Denni, then returned to Drexel Hill with Janine and her daughter Madeline.

For seven years, Alexander worked as an advertisement writer, layout artist, cartoonist, and assistant editor while striving for his first publication. He spent the next ten years writing for adults before turning to young adult novels. He won the Newbery Honor in 1966 for The Black Cauldron, and the Newbery Medal in 1969 for The High King, books in a series about the adventures of an assistant pig keeper set in the mythical land of Prydain. In addition to the Prydain Chronicles, series and books by Alexander include the Westmark Trilogy, the Vesper Holly Adventures, and over twenty other young adult novels, five adult novels, and four French translations. He completed his final novel, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, before his death in 2007.

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Meet Your Author: Lloyd Alexander, by Art Director Trina Schart Hyman, in Cricket, January, 1973

References

Carus, Marianne. 2003. Celebrate Cricket: 30 years of stories and art. Chicago: Cricket Books.

Cricket Media records, 1960-2022, Southern Illinois University Special Collections Research Center

Hyman, Trina Schart. Meet Your Author: Lloyd Alexander. Cricket, January, 1973.