The beloved children's author Tomie dePaola, who was born in Connecticut on September 15, 1934 and whose imaginative and warm-hearted works crossed generations and continents, died Monday at age 85. His death was announced, without details, on social media by his assistant, Bob Hechtel.
DePaola's works covered many areas of his imagination, from a magical tale centered on a kind and caring Calabrian grandmother — Strega Nona, which won the Caldecott Honor Award in 1976 — to retelling the inspiring Comanche story of The Legend of the Bluebonnet. In 2000, he won a Newbery Honor for his book 26 Fairmount Avenue, which described his early childhood. Quiet, published in 1980s, is one of his bestselling books. By dePaola's own count, he worked on some 270 books-the first in 1965, and the most recent published last year.
In 2011, he won a lifetime prize, the Children's Literature Legacy Award, which praised his "considerable and lasting contribution to literature for children." In all, nearly 25 million copies of his books have been sold around the world.
Along with his work as an author, dePaola taught art and theater at various colleges in California, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. For many years, he made his home in New London, N.H.
In 1998, dePaola told a radio reporter that he hoped to recognize children for all their natural abilities. "As a grown-up," he said, "I want to give children the credit for everything I can: their courage, their humor, their love, their intellectual abilities, their abilities to be fair, their abilities to be unfair. But I do wish that we grown-ups would give children lots of credit for these temporary kinds of qualities that they have."
