Phyllis Krasilovsky

Phyllis Krasilovsky
Born	(1926-08-28)August 28, 1926
Died	February 26, 2014(2014-02-26) (aged 87)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer
Known for	Children's books

Phyllis Louise Manning Krasilovsky (August 28, 1926 – February 26, 2014) was an American writer of children's books.

Life

Phyllis Louise Manning was born in Brooklyn and graduated from its James Madison High School. She recalled that she started telling children's stories to her then-fiancé William M. Krasilovsky's five-year-old cousin, who was dying of cancer. Kravilovsky was first published after she walked into the Doubleday offices and insisted she must see an editor immediately before the couple left for Alaska. Children’s book editor Margaret Lesser heard the confrontation at the front desk, invited her in, read the manuscript and accepted The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes a few minutes later. Krasilovsky’s husband, at the time still a student at Cornell Law School, carefully studied the contract before approving.

Then they headed for Alaska. Their Crossley miniature car was so small, the wheel span was too narrow for the wooden tracks they occasionally encountered on the unpaved Alaska Highway. They had to hitch over the bridges with the car on the back of trucks. Phyllis subsequently used her power of persuasion in the Yukon to get them overnight lodging in a jail when they had nowhere else to stay. They were featured in an article in Ladies' Home Journal, "How America Lives: Newcomers to Alaska".

Over the years Krasilovsky published 20 books for children, including The Very Little Girl and Scaredy Cat and perhaps best remembered, The Cow Who Fell in the Canal and Benny’s Flag. She described her The Popular Girls Club as "one of the first books about mean kids." Her books were translated into fourteen languages.

In the late 1960s, Krasilovsky was part of an initiative of eminent children’s book authors who pressed for foreign rights to their works to be negotiated separately from domestic publishing contracts. The first meeting, including Maurice Sendak, Margret Rey and H. A. Rey, Ruth Krauss, Remy Charlip, and Crockett Johnson, was held in her living room in Chappaqua, New York.

Beginning in 1970, Krasilovsky taught children’s literature at Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY, for three years; she was asked to lead the academic procession at graduation despite her lack of a college degree. As a child of the Depression, she had attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn on the commercial track to learn typing and stenography but also joined the debating team, whose medal she won in her graduating year and where she met her future husband.

The Krasilovskys already had four children when the success of her book The Cow Who Fell in the Canal led the Dutch government to reward her with a trip to the Netherlands. When she wrote about it afterwards, it led to a second career as an independent travel writer. She produced articles such as "Yes, It’s Safe to Bring Your Children to Northern Ireland". Another, about traveling to countries such as Haiti with her suitcase packed with her children’s outgrown clothes to distribute there, won a Society of American Travel Writers Foundation award. Eventually she traveled to 147 countries. The Dutch honored her again in 1982 with a reception at the consulate in New York upon the publication of her book The First Tulips in Holland.

In addition to writing for many magazines, she wrote several op-eds for The New York Times and sometimes edited publications.

Krasilovsky was also noted for domestic accomplishments. The New York Times featured her house-swapping country mouse/city mouse family experience with one of her illustrators, Cyndy Szekeres. Another Times article presented how she utilized her freezer in her gourmet cooking.

Her children are Alexis Krasilovsky, now a filmmaker, Jessica, author/illustrator of her own Doubleday children's book, Margaret Brookes and Peter Krasilovsky.

Krasilovsky died at the age of 87 on February 27, 2014, in Redding, Connecticut, of complications from a stroke.

Books

• The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes (Doubleday, 1950), illustrated by Barbara Cooney
• The Very Little Girl (1953), illus. Ninon [Ninon MacKnight]; 1992 edition illus. Karen Gundersheimer, LCCN 91-44949
• The Cow Who Fell in the Canal (1957), illus. Peter Spier
• Scaredy Cat (1959), illus. Ninon
• Benny's Flag (1960), illus. W. T. Mars; 2002 edition illus. Jim Fowler – "recounts the story of Jon Ben Benson, a young Aleut boy who enters a contest to design a state flag for Alaska"
• The Very Little Boy (1962), illus. Ninon; 1992 edition illus. Karen Gundersheimer, LCCN 91-44948
• Susan Sometimes (1962), illus. Abbi Giventer
• The Girl Who Was a Cowboy (1965), illus. Cyndy Szekeres
• The Very Tall Little Girl (1969), illus. Olivia H. H. Cole
• The Shy Little Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), illus. Trina Schart Hyman
• The Popular Girls Club (Simon & Schuster, 1973), illus. Hyman
• L. C. is the Greatest (1975) – 129 pages, OCLC 1551120
• The Man Who Tried to Save Time (1979), illus. Marcia Sewall
• The Man Who Entered a Contest (1980), illus. Yuri Salzman
• The Man Who Cooked for Himself (Parents Magazine Press, 1981), illus. Mamoru Funai
• The First Tulips in Holland (1982), illus. S. D. Schindler – "fictionalized account of how a Dutch merchant brought tulip bulbs from Persia", OCLC 7460219
• The Christmas Tree That Grew (1987), illus. Kathy Wilburn
• The Happy Times Storybook (1987), illus. Ruth Sanderson
• The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fix Things (1992), illus. John Emil Cymerman
• The Woman Who Saved Things (1993), illus. Cymerman

External links

• Phyllis Krasilovsky at Library of Congress, with 25 library catalog records