Susan Farley for The New York Times
Jean Craighead George in her yard in Chappaqua, N.Y.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: May 16, 2012
Jean Craighead George, a Newbery Award-winning writer for young people whose books brought the natural world from the Catskill Mountains to the Alaskan tundra to wild, luminous life, died on Tuesday in Mount Kisco, N.Y. She was 92.
Her family confirmed the death.
The author of more than 100 fiction and nonfiction titles that have collectively sold millions of copies, Ms. George was best known for two novels for older children, “My Side of the Mountain” (1959), which she also illustrated, and “Julie of the Wolves” (1972), illustrated by John Schoenherr. That book won the Newbery Medal — considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s letters — in 1973.
“My Side of the Mountain” tells the story of Sam Gribley, a youth who forsakes a life of quiet desperation in New York City to live on his own in the Catskills wilderness. There, he survives by virtue of the deep sympathy with nature that animates all of Ms. George’s protagonists, until the modern world closes in again.
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