Zilpha keatley snyder the unseen
Castle Court Kids series [ edit ]. Gib series [ edit ]. William S series [ edit ]. Other [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. October 15, October 14, October 19, October 8, Retrieved October 13, Zilpha Keatley Snyder zksnyder. Accessed November 23, Black and Blue Magic , written for Snyder's son, who wanted a funny story about a boy, also uses a magic device—an ointment that causes a twelve-year-old boy to grow wings.
Although contrived, the book moves along with much realistic dialogue and deftly portrays an adolescent who gradually gains a greater sense of self-worth. In Eyes in the Fishbowl , a suspense story for older readers, Dion, a shoeshine boy, spends his spare time in the basement of a department store. He becomes aware that Madame Stregovitch in the cosmetics department has summoned the "Others," the spirits of needy children, who terrify the clerks with their antics and cause so much confusion the store eventually goes out of business.
The plot is spun out and slightly didactic, but Dion's strained relationship with his casual, easygoing musician father is true to life, and the department-store setting is vivid with realistic details. Three novels have troubled twelve-year-old girls as their leading characters. The Velvet Room develops around dreamy, intelligent Robin Williams , the daughter of migrant workers, and a migrant worker herself, who finds a special haven in the library of a deserted mansion where the owners of a large fruit ranch used to live.
The Truth About Stone Hollow is deft and rich in its characterization of both adults and children and in its portrayal of smalltown relationships and prejudices. Both these novels are set in rural California during the Depression. The Witches of Worm takes place in a modern urban apartment complex. Jessica thinks either she herself is a witch or that her cat is a witch's cat.
Whatever causes her to do the spiteful things she does, it is clear that she is hostile and angry and feels misunderstood by her mother and playmates. Although, like many of Snyder's conclusions, this one is abrupt and unsatisfying, the story is fast paced and presents an intriguing picture of a girl's attempts to come to grips with the painful realities of her life.
One of Snyder's most highly regarded books, both by critics and children, is The Egypt Game , with characters based on children Snyder taught at the Washington School in Berkeley. The story arose out of her desire for a book to encourage close and proud identification with minority characters. A group of children play in the yard of the strange and aloof Professor—who runs a secondhand store—and imagine themselves to be rulers and gods in ancient Egypt, until a child is murdered in the neighborhood and the old Professor is suspected of being responsible.
Although the story moves with suspense and humor, the interracial cast seems too deliberately assembled and the plot too carefully concocted to thrill young readers. Snyder produced seven books for children and two young adult novels in the s. Numerous others were given the Dell Yearling Edition distinction. More recently, Snyder's work Cat Running highlights her characterization skills and concern with social interaction.
The book is set in the dust bowl during the Depression and shows how a young, slightly self-absorbed girl overcomes problems within her family and reaches beyond prejudice. Snyder drew on her descriptive powers for the next novel, The Trespassers , which tells the tale of children exploring a deserted mansion. Thirty years following publication of The Egypt Game , Snyder picks up the story of the young characters of this novel to play in The Gypsy Game Toggle navigation.
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Zilpha keatley snyder autobiography examples
View the Lesson Plans. About the Author. Plot Summary. The Discovery of Egypt. Enter April. Enter Melanie -- And Marshall. The Egypt Girls. Jonah, in particular, was a role that adapted well when one had, as I often did, tonsillitis. Being forced to stay in bed was less of a handicap when the scene being enacted took place in a whale's stomach.
But something should be said about the real people who were an important part of those early years. My father, William Solon Keatley, was a tall slow-moving man, the memory of whose kindness, patient devotion and unfailing sense of humor is, to me, proof that it is possible to surmount the effects of an appalling childhood.
The first child of John William Keatley, a young Englishman who immigrated to America in the s, and Zilpha Johnson his Nebraskan bride—my father's first few years of life were happy ones. But when he was five years old his mother died. Putting my father and his two younger brothers in an orphanage, my grandfather went to California, promising to send for the boys as soon as he was able.
But for some reason the summons to a new life never came. The orphanage, losing patience, allowed the two younger boys to be adopted.
But by then my father was too old to interest adoptive parents, and old enough to be of temporary interest to various people, some of them relatives of his mother, who needed an extra ranch hand. Forced to do a man's work at the age of eight, often beaten, punished by being sent out mittenless in freezing weather, so that his frozen hands very nearly had to be amputated, he survived to become a gentle man with crooked hands, who loved people almost as much as he loved horses, and who treated both with unfailing kindness.
As a young man he worked as a cowboy, in the days when many ranges were still unfenced; and in later years he told wonderful stories about broncobusting, roundups and stampedes, and above all—HORSES. He sometimes said that he might forget a man but never a horse, and I'm sure it was true. As a child I knew all his horses through his stories including Old Washboard, who had an iron mouth and a penchant for hunting wild horses and who, on spotting a herd of wild ones, took off, completely ignoring the desires of his helpless rider who willy-nilly accompanied him on a mad chase, leaping gulleys and plunging down almost vertical cliffs with wild abandon.
Fearing that someday Old Washboard would tackle a cliff he couldn't handle—"the only horse that ever scared me spitless," my father would say—he chickened out and sold him to a gullible passerby, just as innumerable owners had surely done before. It was not until my father was in his forties and the owner of a small horse ranch in Wyoming that he was contacted by his father.
Warmly received by his father's second family in California, he decided to relocate there. And it was there that he met Dessa Jepson, a thirty-five-year-old spinster schoolteacher, a cousin of his stepmother. The Jepsons were Quakers. They had lived for many generations in Maine, the first Jepson arriving there in , but in the s several branches of the family moved west.
My mother was born in California, the youngest of six children. Several years younger than her nearest sibling, she was born when her parents were middle-aged, and on the death of her mother she became her father's housekeeper and companion. I never knew my grandfather, Isaiah Clarkson Jepson, but he must have been a complicated and determined man.
A farmer who had tried photography and teaching and who loved poetry, he doted on Dessa, his youngest daughter, and effectively discouraged her early suitors. His death when she was in her early thirties left her rudderless and she suffered what she later referred to as a nervous breakdown. On recovering she returned to work and was teaching in Yorba Linda, California when she met my father.
It was a romance right out of Zane Grey—the bachelor rancher meets the lonely schoolteacher. My parents were living in Lemoore, California when my older sister, Elisabeth, and I were born, my father having accepted what he thought of as a temporary job until he could get back to ranching.
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But the Depression deepened and, to support his growing family, he continued at a job he hated. It was after he was transferred to Ventura, California that my younger sister, Ruth, was born. Like my father, my mother was a storyteller. Like his, her stories were true accounts of past events. Mother's childhood was always very close to her and she had a tremendous memory for detail.
She made the people and events of rural California at the turn of the century as real to me as were those of my own childhood in the ls. So I came by my storytelling instincts honestly but, as it soon became apparent, their acquisition was all that was honest about them. It wasn't exactly that I was a liar.
Zilpha keatley snyder autobiography examples pdf
I don't think I told any more of the usual lies of childhood—those meant to get you out of trouble or get someone else into it—than most children. It was just that when I had something to tell I had an irresistible urge to make it worth telling, and without the rich and rather lengthy past that my parents had to draw on, I was forced to rely on the one commodity of which I had an adequate supply—imagination.
Sometimes when I began an account of something I had heard or witnessed my mother would sigh deeply and say, "Just tell it. Don't embroider it. At the age of eight I became, in my own eyes at least, a writer. I sometimes say that I decided on a writing career as soon as it dawned on me that there were people whose life's work consisted of making up stories.
Up until then my tendency to "make things up" was one of the things that came to mind when I repeated that phrase about "trespasses" in our nightly prayers.
Zilpha keatley snyder autobiography examples free
The idea that there were people who were paid, even praised, for such activities was intriguing. I began "Princess" Zilpha in the wagon, about as most children do with poems and very short stories, and I was fortunate to have a fourth-grade teacher who took an interest in what I was doing. She collected my works, typed them, and bound them into a book.
I loved it—and her. This early opus, while showing no great originality of thought or unique turns of phrase, does seem to exhibit a certain feeling for the rhythm and flow of words. The following excerpt owed its subject matter to a "social studies project" on China. Did you ever see a water buffalo, Slowly around a rice field go, Dragging a plow at every step?
To plow a rice field takes lots of pep, So when the buffalo's work is done He goes down to the river to have some fun. He wallows down where the mud is deep, And shuts his eyes and goes to sleep. My memories of my first five years of school are pleasant ones. I was a good student, although my abilities were decidedly lopsided.
I could memorize a poem in a flash, but the result of multiplying seven times eight eluded me for months, until my mother printed this slippery bit of information on a card and pinned it to the wall in front of the kitchen sink where I was forced to stare at it every evening while doing the dishes. It worked, I guess.
I'm not sure whether my hatred of doing dishes spilled over onto the multiplication tables or vice versa, but I'm still not particularly fond of either. Although there were times when I would have gladly traded my proficiency in reading and writing for a little skill at something that really mattered to my contemporaries such as running races or catching fly balls, I had few problems in the small country schools I attended until the end of sixth grade.
But then came the seventh grade in the big city of Ventura. Too young for my grade, having been advanced by a first-grade teacher who didn't know what to do with me while she was teaching reading, and further handicapped by being raised by a mother who hadn't really faced up to the twentieth century, I was suddenly a terrible misfit.
Still wearing long curls and playing secret games, I was too intimidated to make an effort to relate to girls who wore makeup and danced with boys. So I retreated further into books and daydreams. Books were the window from which I looked out of a rather meager and decidedly narrow room, onto a rich and wonderful universe.
Zilpha keatley snyder books: Zilpha Keatley Snyder contributed the following autobiographical essay to SATA: When I look back to the beginning, at least as far back as memory will take me, I see most vividly animals and games and books.
I loved the look and feel of them, even the smell. I'm still a book sniffer. That evocative mixture of paper and ink and glue and dust never fails to bring back the twinge of excitement that came with the opening of a new book. Libraries were treasure houses. I always entered them with a slight thrill of disbelief that all their endless riches were mine for the borrowing.
And librarians I approached with reverent awe—guardians of the temple, keepers of the golden treasure. It has occurred to me to wonder if I might not have faced up to life sooner if I had been deprived of books. I know my father worried sometimes about the amount of time I spent reading. My father, not my mother. Her first priority was that we were safely and virtuously at home, with a book or without one.
Lacking a refuge in books, would I have been forced to confront my social inadequacies and set myself to learning the skills that would have made me acceptable to my peers? But then I wonder if it would really have been a fair trade. Would dances and parties and inexpert kisses by pimply contemporaries have made me happier than did Mr.
Rochester, Heathcliff, the Knights of the Round Table and the many other heroes and heroic villains with whom I was intermittently in love? Who's to say? In any event, I went on reading—and suffering the daily agony of the preteen outcast. Beyond my personal world of home and school and books and dreams, the Depression deepened.
Although my father never lost his job, his salary was cut and cut again until he was finally unable to cover the mortgage payments and it was only the New Deal's mortgage relief legislation that enabled us to keep our home. Like so many other families, we lived constantly under that sword of Damocles called the "pink slip.
Sometimes as I walked past the "Okie Camp" that had sprung up on a neighbor's vacant land—trying to pretend I wasn't staring at the cardboard shanties, broken down cars and ragged dirty children—I fantasized that I belonged there; that I would turn in on the dirt road and as I approached the first crumbling shanty I would see my mother in the doorway.
It was a game that both intrigued and terrified me. As the first decade of my life ended the times slowly began to get better. The Okie camps disappeared, people who had been laid off went back to work and salaries began to rise. And then one day when we turned into our driveway after a Sunday morning at church, a neighbor ran to meet us. The Japanese, she said, had attacked Pearl Harbor.
I was in my early teens during the war and I would like to report that I thought deeply about the issues involved and the terrible suffering that was going on around the world—but it wouldn't be true. In spite of the fact that a Japanese sub once shelled an empty field not far from where we lived, and we had occasional air raid drills in our classrooms, the war seemed distant and almost unreal.
I wrote a few sentimental war poems and went on reading and dreaming. Years later when I visited Anne Frank's apartment in Amsterdam and saw the pictures of movie stars on her bedroom walls, familiar Hollywood faces of the forties, treasured by teenage girls in California as well as those in hiding in Amsterdam, I was deeply shaken.
I cried not only with grief for Anne but with shame that I had known and cared so little. By the time I was in high school my social skills had begun to improve, and I became a little less afraid of my peers. I had some good teachers and made some exciting new friends, such as Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.
And college was wonderful. At Whittier College, a small private liberal arts school in Southern California, originally established by Quakers, I grew physically and socially as well as intellectually. I discovered contemporary authors, politics, social injustice, psychology—and boys; men, actually, as the time was the late forties and campuses were full of returned servicemen.
It was a good time to be in college. I learned a lot at Whittier: facts, ideas, and essences. Many of the facts have faded, as elusive as seven times eight, but I remember that Whittier taught me how little I knew; a startling concept to any new high school graduate. And even more important—how little anyone knew. Until then I had been satisfied that all possible knowledge was pretty much in hand, and as a student my only job would be to commit it to memory.
What a thrill to realize Zilpha at Whittier College, about that a lot of so-called facts were actually still up for grabs, and that decision-making was a part of learning. And one more thing I owe to Whittier—my husband, Larry Snyder. We met first in the Campus Inn where we both waited on tables, and when I first saw him he was playing the piano.
Six-foot-five with curly black hair and blue eyes, Larry was a music major who was also an athlete, a charismatic extrovert who was—and still is—a natural scholar, and a small-town boy who was born with a Ulysses-like yearning for new horizons. I liked him a lot. I still do. But I was planning to be a writer. I wanted to live in New York City, in an attic apartment, and write serious novels for serious people.
It's a good thing I didn't try it. At barely twenty-one with a new college degree, I had a sketchy instinct for self-preservation and all the sophistication of a cocker spaniel puppy. New York City would have eaten me alive, and that's without even trying to guess what New York editors would have done to me.
The pages that have survived from the period suggest that as a writer I still had the lively imagination of my childhood, and some feeling for the sound and sweep of a sentence. But style, theme, subject matter, and even handwriting I still didn't own a typewriter have a pronounced aura of puppy. Facing up to the fact that I didn't even have the money for a ticket to New York City, I decided to be practical.
So, "temporarily until I got back to ranching," I took another job—I decided to teach school. Only I was more fortunate than my poor dear father. I didn't hate my temporary job. In fact, I liked it a lot. After the first year, which was a bit traumatic until I stopped being surprised when I told the class to do something and they did it, I developed into what must have been a pretty good teacher.
I taught in the upper elementary grades for a total of nine years, three of them as a master teacher for the University of California at Berkeley, during which time my classroom was almost constantly being observed by teachers in training. I found teaching to be as rewarding as it was demanding, and I would probably still be at it if I hadn't been lucky enough to have my dream-ranch become a reality when my first book was published—but that was later.
And I also decided to accept Larry's offer of marriage, which was probably the best decision I ever made.