Florence Crannell Means
Florence Crannell Means (1891-1980) was an American author known for her contributions to children's literature, particularly focusing on the experiences of minority cultures in the United States. Born in Baldwinsville, New York, she was raised in a family that valued racial equality and cultural diversity, a principle that influenced her later work. After marrying attorney Carl Bell Means and relocating to Boulder, Colorado, she began her writing career, co-authoring her first book aimed at young readers in 1933.
Means wrote numerous young adult novels, often featuring teenage girls from diverse backgrounds. She made a concerted effort to accurately portray these cultures by spending time in communities such as San Francisco's Chinatown, African American neighborhoods, and Native American reservations. Her notable works include *A Candle in the Mist* and *The Moved-Outers*, the latter of which received critical acclaim, including a Newbery Honor.
Despite her dedication to fostering understanding through literature, her works fell out of favor in the 1960s as discussions around representation in literature evolved. Nonetheless, Means' legacy remains significant as one of the early voices promoting cultural awareness and empathy among young readers.
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Subject Terms
Florence Crannell Means
Author
- Born: May 15, 1891
- Birthplace: Baldwinsville, New York
- Died: November 19, 1980
- Place of death: Boulder, Colorado
Biography
Florence Crannell Means was born on May 15, 1891, in Baldwinsville, New York, the daughter of Philip Wendell Crannell, a minister and author, and Fannie Eleanor Grout Crannell, a homemaker. Philip Crannell believed strongly in racial equality, and Means grew up in a home that welcomed guests of different cultural and racial backgrounds. By the time she graduated from high school, the family was living in Kansas City, where her father was president of the Kansas City Baptist Theological Seminary. She studied privately with her father for a time and then enrolled in the Henry Read School of Art in 1910. In 1912 she married Carl Bell Means, an attorney and businessman. The couple settled in Boulder, Colorado, and had a daughter, Eleanor. Means and her husband also provided financially for several children from other countries and cultures.
Means had long been interested in promoting education and harmony among ethnic groups in the United States. Her first book, cowritten with Harriet Fullen, was Rafael and Consuelo: Stories and Studies About Mexicans in the United States for Primary Children. Her first solo novel was A Candle in the Mist, based on stories of her grandparents’ pioneering days in southwest Minnesota. Means eventually wrote numerous young adult novels, many of them about teenage girls from minority cultures in the United States.
A white woman wishing to portray people of color as accurately and respectfully as possible, Means spent months living among the people she wrote about. She traveled to Mexico, San Francisco’s Chinatown, African American neighborhoods, and Indian reservations to form relationships with the people on whom she based her characters. To write Shuttered Windows, the story of an African American girl from Minneapolis who visits her grandmother on a coastal island off South Carolina, Means spent time in the Carolina low country. For The Moved-Outers, about Japanese Americans during World War II, she visited a Japanese relocation center in Colorado.
In addition to her novels, Means wrote juvenile plays and adult biographies, including one of Frederick Douglass. By the 1960’s, her books started to fall out of favor as prevailing sentiment held that books about minority cultures should be written by members of those cultures. She died on November 19, 1980, in Boulder, at the age of eighty-nine.
Means believed that lessons about diversity and understanding were best directed toward young readers, whose beliefs could still be shaped by powerful reading experiences. Her books were early and appealing depictions of other cultures in the middle of the twentieth century, when few such books were available. The Moved-Outers won the Childhood Education Association’s annual award for a character-building book and was a Newbery Honor Book.