Oliver and Amanda Pig series “, author of children’s books, Jean Van Leeuwen dies: NPR

The author of the children’s book Jean Van Leeuwen died. The award -winning writer was best known for his lively tales with characters as anthropomorphic as brothers and sisters pigs and a mouse gang. She died on March 3 at her home in Chappaca, NY at the age of 87.

Van Leeuwen’s daughter Elizabeth Gavril, told NPR that the cause was cancer and said that the family had taken the time to share the news of the author’s death.

Published by Penguin Random House, the 20 -pound series by Van Leeuwen included brothers and sisters of Pork Oliver and Amanda. Amanda Pig and the really hot dayIllustrated by Anne Schweninger, won the Prix Theodor Seuss Geisel of the American Library Association 2006 for the most distinguished book for beginner readers. The book describes how Amanda goes through a hard day of booming temperatures using a sprinkling pipe and lemonade consumption. In Oliver Pig TalesIllustrated by Arnold Lobel, Oliver and Amanda Bake Formal Biscuits with their mom by a cold and humid day, among other activities.

“When we were young, we apparently gave him many history ideas,” said Gavril of his mother in an interview with NPR on Saturday. “A lot of Oliver and Amanda Pig The books are based on experiences that my brother David and I have lived as children. “”

Galvin points to a Amanda Pig Tales History entitled “Amanda’s Egg”. “Amanda does not like eggs and she sits just at the table and she looks at her egg and she will not eat it,” said Gavril of what’s going on in history. “And his father Pig comes out in the courtyard and does his job, and Oliver Pig comes out and mother Pig leaves and, and Amanda Pig is just sitting there and looks at his egg. And it’s certainly a true story.”

Van Leeuwen wrote nearly 60 pounds. They have been translated into several languages ​​and certain titles have sold millions of copies, according to The New York Times. One of them, Large cheese conspiracyWho prompted young readers to a renegade mouse named Marvin the Magnifiment and His Pals, was adapted in 1986 in a Czech animated film.

“She was a wise, humorous and wonderful writer,” wrote the author of the children’s book Roni Schotter in an email of memories transmitted to NPR.

Van Leeuwen was born in Glenridge, NJ, and grew up in Rutherford nearby, the daughter of a father and mother of a school teacher. At the University of Syracuse, she specialized in magazine journalism and took a job in Television guide In New York after graduating in 1959. She worked as a children’s book publisher for about a decade for Random House, Viking Press and Dial Books. Gavril said his mother started writing books on the side and continued to do so after leaving her publishing career to raise her two children.

“We were in this little apartment in New York and she wrote during our nap moments,” said Gavril. “She would just run the dishwasher again and again to drown my brother’s conversation or something else.”

After the family moved to the suburbs of New York in the County of Westchester in 1977, Gavril said that his mother had more time for herself and wrote in a coherent way in the morning, and sometimes also in the afternoon. She has not only written picture books for very young children. Its production included a fiction for basic students and young adults. A popular title for older children is To OregonA fictitious version of the trip made by Mary Ellen Todd, 9, and her family during the Oregon Trail in 1852, with illustrations by James Watling.

As a former editor -in -chief of the children’s book, the author was perfectly aware of his job.

“The challenge of writing an easy -to -read book, with its strict limits of length and vocabulary, is to tell a simple but not ordinary story,” wrote Van Leeuwen in 1987 New York Times book review.

Van Leeuwen did not give many interviews and preferred not to attract too much attention to herself. “Jean was so modest in his writing,” wrote the author and illustrator of the children, Marisabina Russo, who was part of a group of authors with Van Leeuwen. “She has never voluntary to be the first in our group to share her latest project.”

However, she had a community spirit. During her older years, Van Leeuwen has spent more than two decades volunteering at Douglas Grafflin primary school in Chappaqua, according to her daughter.

According to a 2015 article in local publication The interior pressStudents learned to know the author each year as “the community volunteer Ms. Gavril”, to learn later that they had worked with the author of their beloved Oliver and Amanda Pig books all the time.