1. Louise Perkins Fitzhugh was an American writer and illustrator of children's books.
24 Facts About Louise Fitzhugh
1. 2.
Louise Fitzhugh wrote Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, which was later adapted into a short film and a play.
3.
Louise Fitzhugh died at age 46 from a brain aneurysm on November 19,1974.
4.
Louise Fitzhugh was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on October 5,1928 as the only child of Louise and Millsaps Fitzhugh, a lawyer.
5.
Louise Fitzhugh's father came from a wealthy family in Memphis, and she is a descendant of Reuben Millsaps, the founder of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.
6.
Louise Fitzhugh graduated from Emory University and met Louise Perkins, an aspiring tap dancer, in 1926 on a boat traveling from New York to England.
7.
Louise Fitzhugh's father gained custody of her after a publicized legal battle while her mother moved to Hollywood.
8.
Louise Fitzhugh grew up in Memphis with her father and stepmother, Sally Taylor, and was told that her mother was dead.
9.
Louise Fitzhugh's father went on to become a US district attorney.
10.
When Louise Fitzhugh was a teenager, she discovered the truth while working at the Memphis newspaper, The Commercial Appeal and finding coverage of the divorce proceedings in the archive.
11.
Louise Fitzhugh graduated in 1946 from Miss Hutchison's School where she had been popular, but felt out of place as a debutante in upper-class society, and was appalled by her peers' racist attitudes.
12.
Louise Fitzhugh had a series of romantic relationships as teenager, beginning with a boy named Charles McNutt.
13.
Louise Fitzhugh briefly attended Southwestern College after graduating from Miss Hutchison's, and transferred to Florida Southern College in 1947.
14.
Louise Fitzhugh studied child psychology and literature under poet James Merrill at Bard, but left in 1951, six months before her graduation.
15.
Louise Fitzhugh lived in Greenwich Village and studied at the Art Students League and Cooper Union starting in 1952.
16.
Louise Fitzhugh traveled to study art in France in 1954, and Bologna in 1957.
17.
In 1961, Louise Fitzhugh published her first children's book, Suzuki Beane, coauthored with Sandra Scoppettone, which was a parody of Eloise; while Eloise lived in the Plaza Hotel, Suzuki was the daughter of beatnik parents and slept on a mattress on the floor of a Bleecker Street pad in Greenwich Village.
18.
Louise Fitzhugh worked closely with Scoppettone on the production of the book, which incorporated typewriter font and line drawings in an original way.
19.
Louise Fitzhugh had a particularly successful solo exhibition at Banfer Gallery in 1963, but wrote prolifically, penning several plays and adult novels that were never published.
20.
Around this time, Louise Fitzhugh attempted to publish Amelia, a novel about two teenage girls falling in love, in remembrance of her first love Amelia Brent, who had died apparently by suicide in 1956.
21.
Louise Fitzhugh wrote two other books in the same universe, The Long Secret and Sport.
22.
Several of Louise Fitzhugh's books were published posthumously, including Nobody's Family is Going to Change, published eight days after her death in 1974.
23.
Louise Fitzhugh was romantically linked to actress Constance Ford, casting director Alixe Gordin, and her Suzuki Beane collaborator, Sandra Scoppettone.
24.
Louise Fitzhugh died on November 19,1974, at a New Milford, Connecticut hospital of a brain aneurysm.