Lois Lowry

Lois Ann Lowry, born Lois Hammersberg on March 20, 1937, in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, is an American writer whose books for children and young adults often ask readers to face hard subjects directly. She grew up during World War II and the Korean War in a military family that moved often. Her father, Robert E. Hammersberg, was a U.S. Army dentist, and his work took the family from Hawaii to Brooklyn, Carlisle, Tokyo, Governors Island, Staten Island, and Brooklyn Heights. Lowry began reading at three, skipped second grade after first grade, and as a child already dreamed of becoming a writer.

Those early moves shaped much of the way Lowry saw childhood, memory, fear, and belonging. When her father was deployed to the Pacific during World War II, she lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, her mother’s hometown. After the war, she lived in Tokyo from 1948 to 1952 and attended the American School in Japan. She later studied at Pembroke College, where she met Donald Grey Lowry, a U.S. Navy officer. After their marriage in 1956, she left the university and moved with him through several postings, including San Diego, New London, Key West, Charleston, Cambridge, and Portland, Maine. They had two daughters and two sons.

While raising her children, Lowry completed a degree in English literature at the University of Southern Maine in 1972 and continued graduate studies there. In the mid-1970s she worked as a freelance writer and photographer. Her first book, A Summer to Die, was published in 1977, when she was 40. The book’s subject of terminal illness drew on her experience of losing her older sister, Helen, to cancer in 1962. Lowry and Donald Lowry divorced in 1977. Two years later, after moving to Boston, she met Martin Small, with whom she was in a relationship for more than 30 years, until his death in 2011.

Lowry became known for writing books that trust young readers with complex themes. Autumn Street, published in 1980, examines racism, grief, and fear through the eyes of a young girl sent to live with her grandfather during World War II, and is considered her most autobiographical book. That same year she published Anastasia Krupnik, the first book in a series that continued through 1995 and treated serious subjects with humor. In 1989 she published Number the Stars, which won the 1990 Newbery Medal. Her 1993 novel The Giver won the 1994 Newbery Medal and follows Jonas, a twelve-year-old who becomes apprentice to the keeper of memories suppressed by his community.

The Giver became one of Lowry’s best-known works, selling more than 12 million copies as of 2021, while also becoming one of the most frequently challenged books of the 1990s. It is used in some school curricula and prohibited in others. Lowry later expanded its world with Gathering Blue in 2000, Messenger in 2004, and Son in 2012, forming The Giver Quartet. Her other honors include the 2002 Rhode Island Children’s Book Award for Gooney Bird Greene.

Lowry’s life also carried private sorrow. Her son Grey, a USAF major and flight instructor, was killed in a fighter plane crash in 1995, an event she described as the most difficult day of her life. As of 2023, she divides her time between Falmouth, Maine, and a restored 1768 farmhouse in western Maine, and remains a writer and speaker. Her work continues to matter because it meets young readers without talking down to them, giving shape to questions about loss, choice, memory, conflict, and moral courage.