Rachel Field

Rachel Lyman Field (1894-1942) was an American novelist, poet, and children's writer.

Life
Field was a descendant of David Dudley Field (1781-1867), the New England Congregational clergyman and writer. She grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As a child, she contributed to the St. Nicholas Magazine. She was educated at Radcliffe College.

According to Ruth Hill Viguers, Field was "fifteen when she first visited Maine and fell under the spell of its 'island-scattered coast'. Calico Bush [1931] still stands out as a near-perfect re-creation of people and place in a story of courage, understated and beautiful."

Field married Arthur S. Pederson in 1935, with whom she collaborated in 1937 on To See Ourselves. In 1938 one of her plays was adapted for the British film The Londonderry Air. She was also successful as an author of adult fiction, writing the bestsellers Time Out of Mind (1935), All This and Heaven Too (1938), and And Now Tomorrow (1942). They were adapted as films produced under their own titles in 1947, 1940, and 1944 respectively. Field also wrote the English lyrics for the version of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" as used in the Disney film Fantasia.

Field is famous, too, for her poem-turned-song "Something Told the Wild Geese". She also wrote a story about the nativity of Jesus, "All Through the Night".

She moved to Hollywood, where she lived with her husband and two children.

Rachel Field died at the Good Samaritan Hospital on March 15, 1942, of pneumonia following an operation.

Recognition
Field's best-known work, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, received the Newbery Award in 1930, for the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." . Field also won a Newbery Honor award.

The 1944 (posthumous) Prayer for a Child, with a story by Field and illustrations by Elizabeth Orton Jones, won the Caldecott Medal recognizing the year's "most distinguished picture book for children" published in the U.S.

Hitty and Prayer for a Child were both named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list of books deemed to belong "on the same bookshelf" with Carroll's Alice. Prayer for a Child was one of the seventeen inaugural selections in 1958, which were originally published 1893 to 1957. Hitty was added in 1961.

Time Out of Mind won one of the inaugural National Book Awards as the Most Distinguished Novel of 1935, voted by the American Booksellers Association.

Publications

 * "Something Told the Wild Geese", poem-turned-song
 * "All Through the Night", nativity story
 * 1924, The Pointed People, poetry
 * 1924, Six Plays, drama
 * 1926, Taxis And Toadstools, poetry
 * 1926, Eliza And The Elves, fiction
 * 1927, The Magic Pawnshop, fiction
 * 1927, The Cross-Stitch Heart And Other One-Act Plays, drama
 * 1928, Little Dog Toby, fiction
 * 1929, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, fiction — winner of the 1930 Newbery Medal
 * 1931, Calico Bush, fiction
 * 1932, Hepatica Hawks, fiction
 * 1933, Just Across The Street, fiction
 * 1934, Branches Green, poetry
 * 1934, Susanna B And William C, fiction
 * 1934, God's Pocket, fiction
 * 1935, Time Out Of Mind, fiction
 * 1937, To See Ourselves, by Field and her husband Arthur Pederson, fiction
 * 1938, All This and Heaven Too, fiction
 * 1938(?), The Londonderry Air, drama; produced as a film, The Londonderry Air (1938)
 * 1940(?), "Ave Maria" lyrics for the film Fantasia (1940)
 * 1942, And Now Tomorrow, fiction
 * 1944, Prayer for a Child, fiction, picture book illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones — winner of the 1945 Caldecott Medal