Photo by Gay Block

Ann McGovern, best known for her retelling of Stone Soup, died August 8 of cancer. She was 85. Illustrated by Nola Langner, her version of the classic folktale that emphasizes the power of cooperation has sold millions since its publication by Scholastic in 1968. The publisher reissued her text in 1986 with illustrations by Winslow Pinney Pels. McGovern was born in 1930 in New York City. Motivated in large part by a stutter, she began writing at a young age in order to express herself. McGovern began her collaboration with Langner when she was very young: the two met as children, and McGovern would write stories for which Langner provided the illustrations. McGovern continued to write throughout high school and during her first year at the University of New Mexico. She left college to marry, but when she and her husband divorced, she began working to support her young son, Peter. An entry-level job at Little Golden Books gave McGovern the opportunity to publish her first book, Roy Rogers and the Mountain Lion (Little Golden Books, 1955). Soon after, the company gave her a job writing books based on children’s TV shows. While she found the work less than stimulating, it allowed her to support herself and her son, and she took on a variety of assignments, from record album descriptions to book reviews. During a reunion with her old friend Langner, who had become a published children’s book illustrator, Langer encouraged her to continue publishing her own work. McGovern kept making inroads in the children’s literature world as a writer. While working at Random House, she published another book, Why It’s a Holiday (1960). While she was an editor at Scholastic, McGovern founded the SeeSaw Book Club, which helped introduce young children to quality literature by giving students in participating classroom the opportunity to pick out books vetted by teachers and reading experts. Though best known for Stone Soup, McGovern wrote more than 50 children’s books, tackling many genres and formats, from folklore to history to poetry. “What I remember most about Ann was her compassion for people, for human rights. She was far ahead of her time,” says Poet Lee Bennett Hopkins. McGovern dedicated her book Runaway Slave: The Story of Harriet Tubman (Four Winds, 1963) to the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL; she also corresponded with their parents. McGovern’s many sources of inspiration included her love of travel and the underwater world. She became an enthusiastic scuba diver during her marriage to her second husband, Martin Scheiner, whom she married in 1970 and who died in 1992. Her books Shark Lady: True Adventures of Eugenie Clark (1978) and Little Whale (1979, both Four Winds) reflect this passion. In 1984, McGovern published Night Dive (Macmillan), about the experience of exploring the undersea world by darkness; Scheiner and their son Jim provided the photographs. McGovern’s influence could be felt beyond her books. “Even before I knew Ann, there were times when she seemed to be everywhere,” says children’s book expert Leonard Marcus. “When I looked up the first reviews of The Phantom Tollbooth for my 2011 annotated edition, I discovered that Ann had reviewed the book in 1961 for the New York Times. She had gotten that strange, outside-the-box book immediately and realized that a new classic had been born.” The author was also a staunch supporter of libraries and literacy. As part of the New York Library’s Adopt-a-Branch program, she donated more than $500,000 for the renovation of the Muhlenberg branch in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. She also traveled the country, visiting schools and speaking with children. “[Her] skill flowed from her curiosity about the world and her sense of fun and adventure,” says Scholastic Chairman and CEO Dick Robinson. “She was a poet as well, with a touch of imagination and storytelling, which she showed in Stone Soup… writing and promoting books for children reflected her passion for life.”