1. Eleanor Estes was an American children's writer and a children's librarian.
14 Facts About Eleanor Estes
1. 2.
Eleanor Estes was born Eleanor Ruth Rosenfield in West Haven, Connecticut.
3.
Eleanor Estes was the third child of father Louis Rosenfeld, a bookkeeper for a railway, and mother Caroline Gewecke Rosenfeld, a seamstress and story teller.
4.
Eleanor Estes's father died when she was young and her mother's dressmaking provided for the family.
5.
In 1931, Estes won the Caroline M Hewins scholarship for children's librarians, which allowed her to study at the Pratt Institute library school in New York.
6.
Eleanor Estes worked as a children's librarian in various branches of the New York Public Library, until 1941.
7.
Eleanor Estes began writing when tuberculosis left her confined to her bed.
8.
Eleanor Estes's best known fictional characters, the Moffats, live in Cranbury, Connecticut, which is Estes' hometown of West Haven.
9.
Eleanor Estes based the Moffats after her family, including patterning younger daughter Janey after herself, and basing Rufus on her brother, Teddy.
10.
Eleanor Estes taught at the University of New Hampshire Writer's Conference.
11.
Eleanor Estes's papers are held at the University of Southern Mississippi, University of Minnesota, and the University of Connecticut.
12.
Eleanor Estes's book The Hundred Dresses was a Newbery Honor Book in 1945.
13.
Eleanor Estes's classmates felt regret about bullying her when they realized that it was their own faces drawn in the design of dresses by Wanda.
14.
Eleanor Estes based the book on an incident from her own childhood, to atone for staying silent when a peer was bullied.