Editor Margaret K. McElderry died 14 February 2011. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 10 June 1912, she was a great force in children’s publishing, establishing an eponymous imprint, and championing both artist and commercial successes for decades.
After graduating from Mount Holyoke and the Carnegie Library School in Pittsburgh, she got a job in the children’s department of the New York Public Library. During World War II, she worked for the Office of War Information in Europe. Upon her return, she moved into publishing, becoming an editor in the children’s department at Harcourt, Brace. She published books by Mary Norton (the Borrowers books), Susan Cooper, Lucy Boston, Edward Eager, Andre Norton, Erik Blegvad, Nancy Bond, and Margaret Mahy. In 1952, according to Publishers Weekly, “she became the first editor to have books win both the Newbery and Caldecott Medals in the same year—for Eleanor Estes’s Ginger Pye and Finders Keepers by William Lipkind, illustrated by Nicholas Mordvinoff, respectively. After 25 years at Harcourt Brace, in 1972 she was asked by then-chairman William Jovanovich to fire her staff and take early retirement,” because “the wave of the future had passed [her] by.”
McElderry moved to Atheneum and founded Margaret K. McElderry Books. Atheneum later merged into Scribner, which merged into Macmillan, which merged into Simon & Schuster. S&S calls the line “a boutique imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Division, recognized internationally as a publisher of literary author-driven fiction and non-fiction for the teen, middle-grade, picture book and poetry market. We specialize in high quality literary fantasy, contemporary and historical fiction, as well as character-driven picture books and poetry for all ages. McElderry Books is proud of our global identity. We are a leader in acquiring properties from foreign publishers as well as being known for attracting and nurturing talent from other countries.”
The New York Times says she “saw children’s books as the foundation of the publishing industry. ‘If you don’t catch them young,’ she said, ‘you won’t have any adult readers.'”
The Times also notes, “in the 1970s Ms. McElderry married Storer D. Lunt, a former president of W.W. Norton, the publisher. He died about a decade later. She left no immediate survivors. She continued to edit books into her 90s as editor at large of her imprint.”
Edited 25 February 2011: Publishers Weekly has published many remembrances of McElderry by authors, colleagues, and friends, on this page.