B Is for Betsy

Author and illustrator Carolyn Haywood was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 3, 1898. She graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls and the Philadelphia Normal School in 1922. After teaching one year at the Friends Central School, she received a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While there, she studied portrait painting for three years, spent one year studying in Europe, and came back to study illustration. Her first children's book, When I Grow Up, was published in 1931. She is best known for her books in the Betsy and Eddie series. The first book, B Is for Betsy, was published in 1939. Her other works include Snowbound with Betsy, Hello, Star, and Eddie's Friend, Boddles.

Besides writing and illustrating her own books, she also painted children's portraits and painted murals in banks and schools in the Philadelphia area. She received the distinction of a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in 1969 and received the Pennsylvania Librarians Outstanding Pennsylvania Author Award in 1970. She stopped illustrating her own books in the 1970's, but started writing adult books including Book of Honor, a collection of biographies of famous Pennsylvanian women. She died of a stroke on January 11, 1990 at the age of 92.

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