Edith Thacher Hurd


Edith Thacher Hurd was an American writer of children's books. She published 70 books in her lifetime, fifty of them illustrated by her husband, Clement Hurd.

Biography

Edith Thacher was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910 to John Hamilton Thacher and Edith Gilman Thacher. She had one older brother, John Jr., and one younger brother, Nicholas, who served as the United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1970 to 1973.
She attended Radcliffe College and the Bank Street College of Education, where she first met Clement Hurd and Margaret Wise Brown. She taught for four years at New York's Dalton School, and during World War II, worked as a news analyst at the United States Office of War Information in San Francisco. Thacher and Hurd married in 1939, collaborated on over fifty books, and had a son, John Thacher Hurd, who later became a children's book writer as well. Hurd also co-wrote with Brown, under the pseudonym "Juniper Sage."
She died on January 25, 1997, in Walnut Creek, California, aged 86.
Hurd's work, as well as that of her husband and son, was featured at several museums in the traveling exhibition "From Goodnight Moon to Art Dog: The World of Clement, Edith, and Thacher Hurd."

Selected works

Hurry Hurry illus. Mary Pepperrell Dana The Wreck of the Wild Wave: Being the True Account of the Wreck of the Clipper Ship Wild Wave of Boston illus. Josiah Nickerson Knowles Jerry the Jeep illus. Theodore Friday The Galleon from Manila Mr. Shortsleeves' Great Big Store illus. Bernice Myers The Golden Hind, illus. Leonard Everett Fisher Sandpipers illus. Lucienne Bloch Starfish illus. Lucienne Bloch Sailers, Whalers and Steamers: Ships that Opened the West illus. Lyle Galloway Who Will Be Mine? illus. by photographs The White Horse illus. Tony Chen Come With Me to Nursery School illus. Edward Bigelow Dinosaur, My Darling illus. by Don Freeman The Black Dog Who Went into the Woods illus. Emily Arnold McCully I Dance in My Red Pajamas illus. Emily Arnold McCully Song of the Sea Otter illus. Jennifer Dewey

with [Margaret Wise Brown]

The Man in the Manhole and the Fix-It Men, illus. Bill Ballantine, written as "Juniper Sage", OCLC 1698467Five Little Firemen, illus. Tibor Gergely The Little Fat Policeman, illus. Alice and Martin Provensen

Illustrated by [Clement Hurd]

Benny the Bulldozer Caboose Little Brass Band Windy and the Willow Whistle Mr. Charlie, the Fireman's Friend Last One Home is a Green Pig Hurry Hurry — re-issue of a book published in 1938 by W. R. Scott with illustrations by Mary Pepperrell DanaCome and Have Fun Christmas Eve No Funny Business The Day the Sun Danced Johnny Lion's Book What Whale? Where? The Blue Heron Tree This is the Forest Catfish Johnny Lion's Bad Day Wilson's World Johnny Lion's Rubber Boots The Mother Owl The Mother Kangaroo Look for a Bird The Mother Chimpanzee
  • ''Under the Lemon Tree''