11 Facts About Armstrong Sperry

Armstrong Wells Sperry was an American writer and illustrator of children's literature.

Armstrong Sperry's books include historical fiction and biography, often set on sailing ships, and stories of boys from Polynesia, Asia and indigenous American cultures.

Armstrong Sperry is best known for his 1941 Newbery Medal-winning book Call It Courage.

Armstrong Sperry attended the Art Students League of New York from 1915 to 1918, where he studied with F Luis Mora and George Bellows.

Armstrong Sperry spent the spring of 1923 studying at the Academie Colarossi in Paris, and continued to enroll at the Art Students League during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Armstrong Sperry started writing his own adventure stories with tales of the South Seas that were syndicated by Metropolitan.

Armstrong Sperry illustrated books and dust jackets for other writers, including the first edition of Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1929 and the first of several books he would illustrate for Helen Follet, Magic Portholes in 1932.

Armstrong Sperry married Margaret Robertson, a medical doctor and daughter of San Francisco bookseller and publisher AM Robertson, in 1930, whom he had met on his trip to Hawaii in 1925.

Armstrong Sperry's great-grandfather was a sea captain, inspiring his love of the ocean and his book All Sail Set about the clipper ship Flying Cloud, which won him a Newbery Honor Book award in 1936.

Armstrong Sperry was awarded the Newbery Medal for 1940 on June 20,1941, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the Children's Library Section of the American Library Association.

Armstrong Sperry purchased a farm in Thetford Center, Vermont, in the late 1930s, and then moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, at the beginning of World War II.