Reader and Writer for Life: A Biography of Lloyd Alexander
Born January 30, 1924, in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lloyd Alexander seems born to read and write. Alexander remembers reading since the age of three. At first, family members read to him, or he would thumb through books and tell the story to himself from memory or from the pictures when someone wasn’t available to read to him. He learned to read two years before starting school. Alexander read everything he could get his hands on, including his parents’ collection and anything relatives gave him.
These books kept him going until the eighth grade (Alexander was eleven), when he began to visit the city library in Philadelphia. He simply looked at what was there and chose what looked interesting.
Like many children, Alexander found school unenjoyable, and books provided a way for him to leave that unpleasantness. He would go home from school and spend much of his time with his books. He read above his level because of the amount of reading he did as a child and because children’s books usually had much fewer pictures than they do today.
During his youth, Alexander considered several different jobs that he would like to have when he was an adult. These included an archeologist, an artist, and an Episcopalian priest. While he considered these jobs, he wrote because it was natural to him; he didn’t think it could be a career. He had written down stories that came into his mind and even illustrated some of them. When he decided not to pursue these other interests, he continued to write. For a while, he wrote poetry and tried to memorize hundreds of poems to help him broaden his abilities. Unfortunately, any poems he sent to be printed were rejected.
About this time, he began to write realistic short stories. All of the ones he tried to get printed were rejected like his poems. He constantly tried to get publishers and printers to accept his work.
In June of 1940, Alexander graduated from Upper Darby High School. He worked as a bank messenger, went to college for a year and became frustrated, then got a job sorting mail for a refining company. Then he joined the army to fight in World War II and fulfill his views of heroic deeds. As soon as he was sworn in, he realized there was more to war than adventure, and he felt afraid.
Before being sent to France, Alexander and other soldiers were sent to Wales and then England to await orders. That same year, Alexander’s group went to France. He ended up in Paris and worked as a translator for the Allies until the end of the war.
After the war ended, Alexander continued his army-paid education at the University of Paris. During the war, he had had to nearly stop reading and writing; now, he went back to those hobbies and was impressed by the French poet Paul Eluard. He got a chance to meet Eluard and actually translated some of the poems into English. Eluard liked the translations and had his publisher in America hire Alexander to translate all of his work.
Alexander met his future wife, Janine Denni, while in Paris. He and a friend saw Janine and her friends getting drenched in the rain. They gave the girls a ride in their Jeep, which was wet anyway since it had no top. Alexander won Janine over, and they were married on January 8, 1946. They both expected to one day go to America. When the army offered free tickets for soldiers to return to the United States, Alexander sent his wife and her daughter ahead while he finished his education. When he joined them, they lived in his parents’ attic.
For a year, the government continued to pay him, so he was able to spend time writing. He took twelve to fifteen hours a day at it. Alexander even worked on weekends, needing to make up for lost time during the war. He gave a little time to translating Eluard’s poems, but most went to his own work. He wrote two books and began translations of work by Jean-Paul Sartre. Unfortunately, his books were rejected, the translation money was slow in coming, and the money from his time in the army was running out.
Alexander found a job writing advertisements, and then one of the translations was published. He and Janine bought a home in Kellytown. Sadly, Alexander was fired, but Janine got a job at a textile mill. They rented part of their house out to earn more income. As Alexander continued to search for work, his confidence in his future as a writer weakened, and he fell into depression. Finally, when ready to quit, he decided to try writing about his own youth as a bank messenger; the result was And Let the Credit Go. It was published.
His publisher urged his second book out of him. My Five Tigers was about his own cats. He wrote several more adult books before turning to young adult literature. He broke into this category when the Jewish Publication Society asked him to write a couple of historical books for young readers. His next book, Time Cat, was his first fantasy. It was inspired by the silent comings and goings of his cat Solomon. During his research for this story, he felt the need to write about Wales. He left that country out of Time Cat, and after finishing the book, he read into Welsh mythology and kept piles of notes, learning the characters and places.
Thus the foundation stones of Prydain were set. Originally, Alexander and his publisher intended the Chronicles to be a trilogy called The Sons of Llyr; the individual books would be The Battle of Trees, The Lion with the Steady Hand, and Little Gwion. Taran and Eilonwy came out of his editor’s suggestion to include a boy and girl for main characters to identify with all readers. Once the first two books became The Book of Three and The Black Cauldron, Alexander knew he would need more than one more book to finish the story. At first, The High King (the words “of Prydain” were taken out of the title) would come after The Castle of Llyr, but the fourth book referred to maturing that Taran experienced between the third and fourth book. The editor said there needed to be a book to tell about that period in Taran’s life, which resulted in Taran Wanderer. The High King finished the series with publication in 1968.
Two picture books about Prydain, Coll and His White Pig and The Truthful Harp came out about the same time as the last two books. Alexander felt a few more tales about Prydain moving around in his head; these and the two picture books became The Founding and Other Tales of Prydain.
Alexander continued to write, but none of his other books, but he is probably most well known for the Chronicles of Prydain. They represent his love of Wales and its legends, but it also illustrates his own realization while growing up that there are better things to be in life than a warrior. His dream became writing, and he followed that dream and found success in spreading his ideas about justice, life's struggles, and triumph.
The information for this biography comes from source 3.