Jean Van Leeuwen, an award-winning children's book author "whose popular characters included the wholesome siblings Oliver and Amanda Pig and an adventurous, cocksure mouse named Marvin the Magnificent," died March 3, the New York Times reported. She was 87.
Van Leeuwen wrote almost 60 books, from picture books to YA fiction. Her 20 works about an anthropomorphic pig family began with Tales of Oliver Pig, illustrated by Arnold Lobel (1979). She followed that with More Tales of Oliver Pig (1981) and Amanda Pig and Her Big Brother (1982), then continued for almost three decades, ending with Amanda Pig and the Wiggly Tooth, illustrated by Ann Schweninger.
Van Leeuwen had written a few books before her children were born in the early 1970s, but "observing their everyday behavior inspired her to tap out a series of short stories on her portable typewriter about a little boy and girl. She turned them into animal children and then, specifically, into pigs," the Times wrote.
In an interview, David Gavril said his mother was "very observant" and had most likely been taking notes "very discreetly" about the lives of him and his sister, Elizabeth Gavril, who noted: "I don't recall being surprised that the characters were pigs. It's a universal thing in children's publishing that animals can have human characteristics."
Schweninger, whose watercolors illustrated 18 of the 20 Oliver and Amanda books, recalled that over time "the stories became a little broader than the early ones when her children were at home.... They were growing up, their activity levels increased and they were going to school."
Van Leeuwen won the American Library Association's Theodor Seuss Geisel Award in 2006 for Amanda Pig and the Really Hot Day, and received a Washington Irving Children's Book Choice Award from the Westchester Library System in 1996 for Emma Bean, illustrated by Juan Wijngaard.
After earning a bachelor's degree in 1959 from the Syracuse University School of Journalism (now the Newhouse School of Public Communications), Van Leeuwen wrote for TV Guide and became a children's book editor in 1963. She worked for Random House, Viking Press, and Dial Books for Young Readers for 10 years until her daughter was born, the Times noted.
Phyllis Fogelman, a former president of Dial Books for Young Readers who was the author's boss before becoming her editor, said in 1995 that Van Leeuwen's "pitch is always perfect" and that "Jean has a deft touch with characterizations."
Her other books include The Great Cheese Conspiracy (1969), The Great Christmas Kidnapping Caper (1975), The Great Rescue Operation (1982), Benjy and the Power of Zingies (1982), Seems Like This Road Goes On Forever (1979), and Across the Wide Dark Sea: The Mayflower Journey (1995).
For many years, Van Leeuwen volunteered at the elementary school in Chappaqua, N.Y., which her children had attended, helping first graders with their writing, the Times noted. Elizabeth Gavril recalled: "They didn't know her as an author; they knew her as Mrs. Gavril. At the end of the year, they were told that Jean Van Leeuwen, whose books they'd been reading, would be speaking to the class. Then came the surprise reveal--that it was Mrs. Gavril."