Children's author, Poet, Children's literacy advocate, Accessibility of literature
Notable work
Little Racoon series
Lilian Moore (pen name, Sara Asheron; March 17, 1909–July 20, 2004), was a writer of children's books, teacher and poet. She founded and edited for Scholastic's Arrow Book Club, a low-cost mail-order paperback service for children. She also helped found the Council on Interracial Books for Children.
Lilian Levenson was born in The Bronx, New York City on 17 March 1909.[1] She was educated at Hunter College where she graduated with a bachelor in Arts in 1930. She had majored in English and had planned to teach Elizabethan literature at the college level. She then continued with some graduate work at Columbia University. The Great Depression affected these goals, resulting in her finding work as a reading teacher.
While she had initially wanted to teach college-level literature, the Great Depression led to a lack of available jobs. Moore became an elementary school teacher in New York, NY from 1930 to 1937. There, she worked with illiterate children which may have encouraged her to work with the Bureau of Educational Research from 1937 to 1950. Sometime between 1930 and 1937, she also edited for the Unemployed Teacher publication, of the Unemployed Teachers Council. There she trained other teachers to deal with students' reading difficulties. During that time, Moore began working on children's readers. In 1946, she published her first book, A Child's First Picture Dictionary.[2] She began work as a freelance editorial consultant for children's books in 1950. After publishing Old Rosie, the Horse Nobody Understood in 1952, her published books became more frequent. She also began work as a reading specialist in 1952. She went to work as an editor for Scholastic Corporation from 1957 until 1967. In 1957, she suggested that Scholastic make its books more accessible to children by offering low-cost mail-order paperbacks. This was a rather novel concept at the time. This led to her founding and becoming the first editor for Scholastic's Arrow Book Club in 1957. The Arrow Book Club targeted students in fourth through sixth grade. She served as an editor from 1957 until 1967. In 1960, she also became an editor for Grosset & Dunlap publishing in the How and Why Wonder Books division editing easy readers.[2]
In 1963, she found massive success with her "Little Raccoon" series, which was first published by Whittlesey House. The series was translated into Russian and sold over 375,000 copies.[1] A 1974 Soviet animated adaptation of the first book, Little Raccoon («Крошка Енот») became a classic. In 1965, finding a dearth of print materials that Black youth could identify with, she sought to bring together editors, writers and librarians in what became the Council on Interracial Books for Children (or CIBC).[3][1] Her first poetry book came out in 1967. Moore also wrote under the name "Sara Asheron".[4][5][6][7] From 1968 to 1969 she edited history and biography series. She was also a series editor for Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, New York. She later became the director of Brooklyn Community Counseling Center.[2]
^ abcde"Lilian Moore." Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors, Gale, 2007. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1000070021/LitRC?u=sddp_main&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=b9d17be7. Accessed 16 Feb. 2023.
