Peggy Parish, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Peggy Parish

American children's writer

Date of Birth: 14-Jul-1927

Place of Birth: Manning, South Carolina, United States

Date of Death: 19-Nov-1988

Profession: writer, children's writer, novelist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Cancer


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About Peggy Parish

  • Margaret Cecile "Peggy" Parish (July 14, 1927 โ€“ November 19, 1988) was an American writer known best for the children's book series and fictional character Amelia Bedelia.
  • Parish was born in Manning, South Carolina to a poor family, attended the University of South Carolina, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.
  • She worked as a teacher in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and in New York.
  • She taught at the Dalton School in Manhattan for 15 years and published her first children's book while teaching third grade there.
  • She authored over 30 books, which had sold 7 million copies at the time of her death.Parish's most well-known character, Amelia Bedelia, is extremely literal minded and interprets idioms and other verbal expressions literally, which amusingly causes great havoc in each story.
  • This idea originated in conversations between Parish and Greenwillow Books founder Susan Hirschman about the author's observations of her third grade students.
  • Amelia works as a household cook and occasional servant, jobs that Parish did in her home when she was young.
  • She uses no recipes, but, by intuitively combining a little bit of this and a little bit of that, her cakes and cookies and meals are always delicious.
  • She is such a good cook that her employers cannot fire her, despite the disastrous way she misinterprets their instructions: prune the shrubs, scale and ice the fish, file the letters, run over the tablecloth with an iron, shorten these dresses, serve coffee with porridge, heat a can of soup, and so on.
  • The author's word-play, and Amelia Bedelia's fundamental goodness and childlike simplicity appeal to youngsters who are beginning to see and enjoy more than one meaning in a word or a phrase.Parish's nephew, Herman, honored Peggy's life in his book, Good Driving, Amelia Bedelia, by writing in its dedication: "For Peggy Parish, the real Amelia." Recalling Parish's method while working on Too Many Rabbits, Herman described how she wrote out her ideas on index cards, "and sheโ€™d deal out those cards like she was playing solitaire, and then pick them up, retype them, and rewrite everything many times.
  • That was how she worked, and it gave me a lot of respect for her method."

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