The Remarkable Journey of Lloyd Alexander

Drexel Hill, PA, was cloaked in darkness, when suddenly an upstairs window in a white house sprang to life. It was 3 a.m., and Lloyd Alexander had entered his office (affectionately called "The Box") to begin his writing day. Long ago, he had discovered that the muse visited him during these early morning hours, and rising daily in the darkness had become a way of life for this celebrated author of children's fantasy. He wrote seven days a week during his entire career, and he could hardly function if ever the routine was interrupted.

Outside his prescribed writing time, Lloyd lived a simple life, and he was a wonderful, compulsive eccentric—and a paradox. For instance, he kept three event calendars, although he rarely left the house. He composed on a manual typewriter, replacing it with an identical machine when it wore out and buying yet another for a spare. He wrote the first draft of his grocery shopping list on Sunday, refining it on Monday and Tuesday, so it was polished by the time he arrived at Fresh Supermarket each Wednesday, promptly at 9 a.m. He owned three cars during his lifetime, the last a 1972 Chevy Nova he purchased new. It's still in his garage with just over 47,000 miles on the odometer—an average of fewer than 1,400 miles per year.

Lloyd was also a firm believer in Murphy's Law—if something could go wrong, it would. One day, during a visit to the Alexander home, we headed out to the Nova for a quick trip to pick up his weekly pizza. All the way to the garage, Lloyd kept muttering, "Hope it starts." When we settled into the car, he sighed and said again, "Hope it starts." Has the Nova been giving you trouble? we asked. In true Lloyd fashion he answered, "No, it always starts up right away." However, it was clear that each attempt was for Lloyd a roll of the dice.

Although he had no university degrees, Lloyd was the picture of a traditional education. As a teenager, he began reading four hours each day, and before his one and only semester at college, he had finished the entire works of Freud, Jung, and Adler. He knew Shakespeare and Dickens, the Lake poets, and major writers in Europe and Asia. He worked the London Times crossword every morning—in ink!—and allowed himself two mistakes, but often had none. Always interested in music, he knew hundreds of compositions by heart and took up the violin as an adult, practicing daily and playing weekly with a small group of dedicated musicians. As for composers, Mozart was his favorite, and Lloyd's piano was crowned with a bust of the Austrian master and a small portrait sat on his desk as a source of inspiration. In spite of his fine tastes in literature and music, he made no excuses or apologies for reading crime novels or for watching every episode of Xena the Warrior Princess, tuning in to Deal or No Deal each week, and regularly viewing the Teletubbies.

Lloyd at one point in his life aspired to be an artist, but felt he lacked the necessary talent. However, he was an accomplished cartoonist. Each year, he illustrated his own Christmas cards—always with his caricature holding or playing a violin in the midst of a host of anthropomorphized cats posed to represent some classical work of art. Only a true art aficionado could regularly identify the original painting—alas, we usually failed.

In a moment of heartfelt candor, Lloyd once told us decades ago that were he given the choice of writing one more book and then having to die or never writing again and living out his natural lifespan, he would choose the former. As a result of his dedication, Lloyd produced some of the most elegant and powerful prose in the history of modern children's literature. He began writing seriously in high school, and though he wrote and submitted many poems and short stories, his only success was being named a finalist in the Writer's Digest Short Story Contest of 1942. However, he didn't write at all during his military service in World War II. He started again while in Paris, as part of the occupation forces. Contacts he made there led to his being the English translator for Jean-Paul Sartre and the poet Paul Éluard. Returning to his native Pennsylvania with Janine, his French wife, and her daughter Madeleine, he turned to novels for adults, writing 12 hours daily for a year with no success. He then took a job and wrote "only" six hours each day, for six additional years, still without having anything published. Finally, he found his stride with three autobiographical novels: And Let the Credit Go (1955) was based on his year as a bank clerk, My Five Tigers (1956) reflected his life with cats, and Janine Is French (1959, all Crowell) was a humorous take on his wife's response to life in America.

Lloyd's shift to children's books actually began in the early 1960s, when he decided to write Time Cat (1963), the story of a cat who magically spirits his young master to nine different ancient cultures—the sites of each of his previous lives. The research for that book laid the groundwork for "The Chronicles of Prydain," the five-volume series that earned Lloyd a Newbery Honor citation for The Black Cauldron (1965) and a Newbery Medal for The High King (1968, all Holt) and established him as a writer of note. From Time Cat forward, he wrote exclusively for young readers, completing 36 books, most of which were fantasy.

The literary world continued to honor Lloyd's works with prizes, including two National Book Awards for The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (1970) and Westmark (1981), two Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man (1973) and The Fortune-Tellers (1992, all Dutton), and Sweden's "Golden Cat" Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement in writing for young readers.

Lloyd stood apart from the crowd both in the way he wrote and in the way he lived his life. When asked to describe Lloyd's greatest trait, the late Zena Sutherland, a friend and literary critic, replied unhesitatingly, "kindness." And Ann Durrell, Lloyd's editor for more than three decades, recently remembered, "He never took himself pompously." Here is additional evidence: he never charged for a speech. Although he received a steady stream of fan mail, he answered every letter the day it arrived. He prepared breakfast for his wife, Janine, every morning and delivered it to her in bed. Lloyd knew the name of the pest exterminator, the yardman, the service station attendant, the supermarket checker, and the woman at the UPS Store—and their children, who received autographed copies of his books.

Of course, it's easy in a tribute to fall into the singing of praises. The truth is, however, that there was nothing hurried, artificial, or shallow about his living or his writing. He seemed to sum up his own life in Dallben's words to Princess Eilonwy in The Castle of Llyr (Holt, 1966): "Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are." He regularly rose to those heights.

As "The Chronicles of Prydain" come to an end, many of the principal characters depart the world of men for the mythical Summer Country, a "land without strife or suffering." Says the enchanter Dallben, "I [leave] with sorrow but with even greater joy. I am an old man and weary, and for me there shall be rest and a laying down of burdens which have grown all too heavy upon my shoulders" (The High King, p. 229).

Heavy with his own burdens—including the recent loss of his wife and the debilitating effects of cancer—Lloyd Alexander undertook his own voyage to the Summer Country on May 17, 2007, leaving behind a legacy of story not to be exceeded in the landscape of American children's fantasy literature.