Natalie
Babbitt, a celebrated children’s author and illustrator whose
ruminative novel “Tuck Everlasting,” about a family’s immortality, found
a fervent readership and inspired two films and a Broadway musical,
died on Monday at her home in Hamden, Conn. She was 84.
The cause was lung cancer, her husband, Samuel F. Babbitt, said.
Ms.
Babbitt won the inaugural E. B. White Award for achievement in
children’s literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in
2013, a Newbery Honor in 1971 and other accolades during a prolific
literary career that spanned more than four decades and produced some 20
books that she wrote and 10 more that she illustrated.
“Each
new work offers more evidence of the originality, intelligence and high
purpose that make her our most gifted writer for children,” Selma G.
Lanes, a fellow author, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1982.
While
Ms. Babbitt’s personal favorites were “Herbert Rowbarge” (“for women
over 40,” she advised) and “Goody Hall” (“for kids”), she said that if a
reader had to choose one of her books, she would want it to be “Tuck
Everlasting.”
Ms.
Babbitt had been inspired to write “Tuck,” she said, when her
4-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of
dying.
The critic Melanie Rehak, writing in The Times
in 2002, said of the book, “From the moment it appeared, it has been
fiercely loved by children and their parents for its honest, intelligent
grappling with aging and death.”
Anne
Tyler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, described “Tuck Everlasting”
as “one of the best books ever written — for any age.”
“Tuck”
is a cautionary tale about a family of the same name that inadvertently
discovers the proverbial Fountain of Youth and is forced to reconcile
with the anomaly of eternity.
Image
Alexis Bledel and Jonathan Jackson in the 2002 film adaptation of “Tuck Everlasting.”Credit...Ron Phillips/Disney
It has sold four million copies in the United States, was translated into 27 languages and was adapted twice for film — in 1981 and in a 2002 Disney production with Sissy Spacek, William Hurt and Alexis Bledel. The Broadway musical adaptation, at the Broadhurst Theater, was short-lived; it closed on May 29, about a month after opening.
In
the book, a lonely 10-year-old named Winnie Foster wanders into the
woods where Angus Tuck and his family guard their secret of longevity.
Winnie is terrified of death.
“She
would try very hard not to think of it,” Ms. Babbitt wrote, “but
sometimes, as now, it would be forced upon her. She raged against it,
helpless and insulted, and blurted at last, ‘I don’t want to die.’”
Angus,
the family patriarch who considers immortality a curse, tries to
reassure Winnie that the great natural wheel of life must turn.
“‘No,’
said Tuck calmly. ‘Not now. Your time is not now. But dying’s part of
the wheel, right there next to being born. You can’t pick out the pieces
you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the
blessing. But it’s passing us by, us Tucks.
“Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we
are, it’s useless, too. It don’t make sense. If I knowed how to climb
back on the wheel, I’d do it in a minute. You can’t have living without
dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.’”
Natalie
Zane Moore was born on July 28, 1932, in Dayton, Ohio, the daughter of
Ralph Moore, a personnel administrator, and the former Genevieve
Converse, an amateur artist.
She grew up wanting to be an illustrator and was raised with what she later described as “an Ohio life-view.”
“It
is, first of all, uncomplicated,” she explained. “There is the feeling
that certain things are right — and that’s that. Also, there is a sense
of the land’s always being there.”
After
graduating from Smith College, where she majored in fine art, she
married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, with whom she collaborated on a
children’s book, “The Forty-Ninth Magician,” in 1966. (She took one
writing course in college because her husband hoped to become a novelist
and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced. But, she said,
“he didn’t enjoy the long, lonely hours that writing demanded.” He
became a college administrator.)
Image
An anniversary edition of “Tuck Everlasting.”Credit...Macmillan Publishers
In
addition to her husband, she is survived by their children, Dr.
Christopher Converse Babbitt, Thomas Collier Babbitt and Lucy Cullyford
Babbitt, and three grandchildren.
When
her husband became president of Kirkland College in Clinton, N.Y., he
and Michael di Capua, who would remain her editor for 50 years,
encouraged her to write as well as illustrate. The first book she wrote,
“The Search for Delicious,” about an orphan boy surveying the tastiest
food in the kingdom, was published in 1969.
As
her children grew, so did the reach of her imagination. “Knee-Knock
Rise” (1970) was sparked by the memory of loss when her older sister
debunked Santa Claus. “Tuck” followed, published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux in 1975.
“Actually,
I don’t think of ‘Tuck’ as being about death,” Ms. Babbitt said in
1982. “The tale is concerned with life — its finiteness, what this means
and whether or not, ultimately, it is preferable to immortality.”
Then
came “The Eyes of the Amaryllis,” a spectral tale of lost love, in
1977; “Nellie: A Cat on Her Own,” her first full-color book, in 1989;
and many others, through “The Moon Over High Street,” in 2011.
She
was a frequent contributor to The Times Book Review and continued to
write into her 70s, belying an observation she had made decades earlier:
“I have about three or four good ideas left, I think. Then I’ll stop
writing and maybe decorate lampshades or run a marionette theater or
something. I want to use up my ideas and then stop. It’s not fair to the
trees.”
Shortly after she became an
author, she struggled to define what distinguished a children’s book.
She decided it was “The Happy Ending” — not the saccharine
happily-ever-after finale, but the hopefulness of childhood as
contrasted with the pity expressed by adults who say they wouldn’t want
to be young and “have to go through all that again,” by which they mean
the hard lessons in compromise and the abandonment of one dream after
another “down to what we have at last settled on as possible.”
“Alas,
we have not arrived and we are not unique at all,” she wrote in The
Times Book Review in 1970. “We are not beautiful, nor clever, nor even
very good; and, no matter how well we do what we do, there is always
someone who can do it better.
“The
white house on the hill is lost to us forever, and all of our sweet
tomorrows are rapidly becoming yesterdays which were almost (if we were
lucky) but not quite.”
As for
immortality, Ms. Babbitt echoed Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever
would be a terrible thing,” she once said. “It would be boring, sad and
lonely.”
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