Phoebe Erickson

Phoebe Erickson was born on November 23, 1907, in North Bay, Wisconsin, the twelfth of Swedish immigrants Axel and Emelia Erickson's eventual thirteen children.[1] She grew up on the family farm in Door County surrounded by animals and nature, something she later credited with greatly impacting the direction of her artistic career.[2] In a 1952 interview with the Hartford Courant titled Children Find Charm in Phoebe Erickson's Yarns and Drawings, Phoebe described her childhood as follows:[3]

"I drew pictures even before I started to read. My father bought some paper but I used it up in no time. So then I went out in the woods and cut some birchbark and covered that with drawings. It was fun to be behind the big kitchen stove on a rainy day and draw pictures of cowboys and indians, ponies and broncos. At that time in my life I had three ambitions: to be an artist, a poet, and a cowboy."

After finishing eight years of local schooling, Erickson graduated from Bailey's Harbor School in 1921.[4] She moved to Chicago to further her education by studying painting and design at the Art Institute of Chicago as a scholarship student from 1931 to 1933.[5] In 1937, she again moved to New York where she would eventually attend Columbia University.[6] Phoebe soon met trial lawyer Arthur Blair, and the two were later married in the Marble Collegiate Church.[5] Despite their marriage, Phoebe continued to publish books using her maiden name for the entirety of her career.[7]

Erickson and her husband spent their retirement restoring old homes in Spain and Sweden, before finally settling in New England.[8] Phoebe Erickson died at her home in Concord, New Hampshire, on August 23, 2006, at the age of 98. She is buried near her hometown in Bailey's Harbor, Wisconsin.[9]

While attending the Art Institute of Chicago, Phoebe Erickson worked as a freelance illustrator for greeting card and playing card companies. One of the designs she created for the Arrco Playing Card Company, featuring two fawns in a forest, eventually caught the eye of a publisher at Children's Press and she was soon invited to write and illustrate an original children's book about foxes.[5] Erickson's first book, Slip: The Story of a Little Fox, was subsequently published by Children's Press in 1948.[10] Erickson began illustrating children's books full-time soon after, when she moved to New York City to attend Columbia University.[1]

In addition to writing over a dozen original children's books, Erickson was frequently employed as an illustrator by other children's authors. In 1950, she was invited to illustrate the American edition of the sequel to Felix Salten's Bambi.[11] She regularly collaborated with Thornton Burgess, a conservationist and prolific author of stories for children through the 1950s.[12]