She documented an adopted child's search for her biological mother in Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye. Although neither Lowry nor any of her children are adopted, she felt that the subject was important enough to be dealt with at length. She explained: "Maybe it's because of having watched my own kids go through the torture of becoming adults. Memories of her childhood as well as her experiences as a parent have led Lowry to her most popular character: Anastasia Krupnik, the spunky, rebellious, and irreverent adolescent who stars in a series of books that began in That happens to all kids, and to the kids in my books as well.
With the passing of each crisis Anastasia gains new insight into herself; by the book's close she is prepared to move on to a new level of maturity. The broad audience appeal of the first Anastasia book prompted Lowry to write another novel featuring her diminutive heroine. I'm still very fond of her and her whole family," Lowry remarked. Subsequent titles include Anastasia Again! Anastasia must deal with the embarrassment of working for the family of a well-to-do peer.
Lowry's fiction resumed a serious tone with the publication of Rabble Starkey. The twelve-year-old female protagonist Parable Ann "Rabble" was born when her mother was fourteen. She and her mother now live with the Bigelow family while Mrs.
Bigelow is hospitalized for mental illness. The care of Mrs. Bigelow's infant son, Gunther, falls primarily on the shoulders of Rabble and the Bigelow's daughter Veronica. In Lowry received the Newbery Medal for her distinguished contribution to children's literature with Number the Stars. Based on a factual account, the story is set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Denmark.
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her family are drawn into the resistance movement, shuttling Jews from Denmark into neutral Sweden. Newbery committee chair Caroline Ward was quoted by School Library Journal: "Lowry creates suspense and tension without wavering from the viewpoint of Annemarie, a child who shows the true meaning of courage.
Lowry received the prestigious Newbery Medal a second time for her novel The Giver. In this radical departure from her previous works, Lowry creates a futuristic utopian world where every aspect of life--birth, death, families, career choices, emotions, even the weather--is strictly controlled in order to create a safe and comfortable community with no fear or violence. Jonas is twelve years old and is looking forward to an important rite of passage: the ceremony in which he, along with all children his age, will be assigned a life's vocation.
Jonas is bewildered when he is skipped during the ceremony, but it is because he has been selected for a unique position. Jonas will become the new Receiver, the prestigious and powerful person who holds all the memories of the community.
In his lessons with the old Receiver, whom Jonas calls the Giver, Jonas begins learning about the things--memories, emotions, and knowledge--that the community has given up in favor of peacefulness.
At first, these memories are pleasant: images of snow, colors, feelings of love. Because Lowry was a shy, introverted child, she sought companionship and entertainment in the wonderful worlds that existed within the books she found in her grandfather's library. After the war, Lowry and her family joined her father in Tokyo, Japan, where they lived for two years in an Americanized community. She graduated from high school in a class of close to fifty students.
The caption under her senior picture in the school yearbook reads, "Future Novelist. She completed her sophomore year of college, and then, at the age of nineteen, she did what so many other women did during the s: She set her studies aside to get married. Because her husband, Donald Lowry, was a naval officer, Lowry resumed a military lifestyle that included traveling and living wherever her husband was stationed.
She and her husband lived in California, Connecticut, Florida, and South Carolina, and when her husband left the service to attend Harvard Law School, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. After her husband finished law school, the Lowry family, which now included four children, settled in Portland, Maine. Lowry eventually received a bachelor's degree in from the University of Southern Maine and then immediately began work on a master's degree. While attending graduate school, Lowry established herself as an accomplished freelance journalist.
She began writing stories and articles that appeared in publications such as Redbook , Yankee , and Down East , as well as in newspapers. Weston Walsh — and became a photographer, specializing in photographs of children.
In , a collection of her photographs of buildings and houses was published in a book titled Here at Kennebunkport. Lowry's first novel, A Summer to Die , is about the relationship between two adolescent sisters, Meg and Molly, and the effect that Molly's death, as a result of leukemia, has on the family.
Lowry based the relationship between Meg and Molly on her own memories of her relationship with her older sister, Helen, as they were growing up, and on the feelings and emotions that she felt when Helen died of cancer. Lowry's career reached new heights with the historical novel Number the Stars.
The narrator, Annemarie Johansen, is friends with a Jewish girl named Ellen. She and her family help hide Ellen from the Nazis when they begin to round up Jewish citizens. Annemarie also ends up helping Ellen and her family escape from Denmark. Lowry received the prestigious Newbery Award for this work. Four years later, Lowry published one of her best-known novels, The Giver. The story takes the reader to a future community where there's no war and poverty but everyone's lives are tightly controlled.
A young teen named Jonas becomes an apprentice to the title character, the only person with access to memories of the past. The Giver was seen as controversial by some for its violent themes, sexual content and depiction of infanticide and euthanasia. Others, however, heaped praise on this remarkable work, and Lowry won the Newbery for the novel. Over the years, Lowry added to this examination of a dystopian future with Gathering Blue , The Messenger and Son Lowry experienced a tremendous loss in Her son Grey, a U.
Air Force pilot, died in a plane crash. Grey's daughter Nadine was only a toddler at the time of his death.
Despite her grief, Lowry sought to make a book for her granddaughter about her life with her father. She explained to Publishers Weekly that the act of digging through family photos for the project inspired her to reflect on her own life.
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