Rosemary Wells is an author and illustrator of picture books and has written many novels and nonfiction books for young readers, including Mary on Horseback, a biography of Mary Breckenridge that won the Christopher Medal. While researching a historical novel about the Civil War, she came upon a 200-word fragment by Willie Lincoln about a trip taken with his father, and the idea for Father Abraham was born. She lives in Connecticut.
PJ Lynch is an Irish artist who has illustrated several books with American themes, including The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey and When Jessie Came Across the Sea. To illustrate Lincoln and His Boys, he traveled with Rosemary Wells to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and assembled hundreds of contemporary photographs, daguerreotypes, and etchings of Lincoln. He lives in Dublin.
Rosemary Wells is “Mother Goose’s second cousin,” declares Iona Opie, the renowned authority on children’s rhymes who edited My Very First Mother Goose, Here Comes Mother Goose, and Mother Goose’s Little Treasures. Each acclaimed collection features Rosemary Wells’s illustrations, fanciful images that abound in witty cross-references and absorbing details that “children love pointing out to grown-ups who probably haven’t noticed them,” Iona Opie says.
Born in New York City, Rosemary Wells grew up in a house filled with “books, dogs, and nineteenth-century music.” After a brief tenure at the Museum School in Boston, she married and began a career as a book designer, then published her own first picture book in 1968. From the start, Rosemary Wells’s work has been recognized for its strong sense of humor and realism and its gently rebellious approach to childhood. Her books have received numerous honors, including a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year award for My Very First Mother Goose.
Young children everywhere have adored the more than sixty picture books Rosemary Wells has created over some three decades. “Simple incidents from childhood are universal,” she says. “The children and our home life have inspired many of my books.” Among them are two endearing books she wrote and illustrated, Felix Feels Better (a New York Times bestseller) and Felix and the Worrier, both about a lovable little guinea pig. “Most of my books use animals rather than children as characters,” Rosemary Wells admits. “People always ask why. There are many reasons. First, I draw animals more easily and amusingly than I do children. Animals are broader in range—age, time, and place—than children are. They also can do things in pictures that children cannot. They can be slapstick and still real, rough and still funny, maudlin and still touching.”
Indeed, not all of Rosemary Wells’s ideas come from within the family circle. “I put into my books all of the things I remember,” she says. “I am an accomplished eavesdropper in restaurants, on trains, and at gatherings of any kind. These remembrances are jumbled up and changed, because fiction is always more palatable than truth. Memories become more true as they are honed and whittled into characters and stories.”
Rosemary Wells lives in Connecticut.
P.J. Lynch began to draw when he was very young. “My mama says that while everyone else was off playing football, I was always drawing,” he says. “I got a lot of encouragement to continue with it. I’m not sure which came first—the encouragement or my showing any talent. But because I was encouraged, I kept at it, practiced, and improved.”
P.J. Lynch does more now than merely practice. Well known in publishing for the research he devotes to his exquisite and detailed illustrations, he has won the Kate Greenaway Medal for outstanding illustration in children’s books twice and is a three-time recipient of the Christopher Medal, which is awarded to works that “affirm the highest dignity of the human spirit.”
Among his Christopher Medal–winning books is Susan Wojciechowski’s The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, a tale of a woodcarver whose grieving heart is healed by a gentle request. P.J. Lynch recalls first hearing the story read in an editorial meeting, where there were more than a few damp eyes in the group. At that time he had illustrated only stories of fantasy, “magic, fairies, that sort of thing.” He was not sure just how he would create what this tale needed, but he knew he wanted to do it. And so, to immerse himself in the story’s setting, he flew from his home in Ireland to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, where he studied early American furniture, buildings, and artifacts.
Similarly, before working on Grandad’s Prayers of the Earth, P.J. Lynch traveled to a tiny island in Minnesota to walk the same woods that author Doug Wood used to walk with his grandfather. Illustrating Amy Hest’s When Jessie Came Across the Sea required little research, however, as the story is one the Belfast-born artist felt he could immediately relate to. “Immigration is an experience with which the Irish are very familiar,” he explains. “Although it is a very personal story of one girl’s journey, it is also a story on an epic scale.”
Other works P.J. Lynch has illustrated for Candlewick Press include A Christmas Carol, The Gift of the Magi, Lincoln and His Boys, Mysterious Traveler, and No One But You.
“I hope my work never settles into a recognizable ‘style,’” says P.J. Lynch, who now lives in Dublin, Ireland, with his family. “So long as I am learning, my work will always be changing.”
