Russell Freedman
Russell Freedman was an influential American author and biographer, born on October 11, 1929, in San Francisco, California. Growing up in a literary environment, with his father working in publishing and his mother being an actress, Freedman developed an early passion for writing encouraged by his fifth-grade teacher. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he embarked on a diverse writing career that included roles as a reporter, editor, and advertising writer. Freedman gained prominence in children's nonfiction literature with the publication of *Teenagers Who Made History* in 1961, which marked the beginning of a successful journey characterized by extensive research and a commitment to historical accuracy.
His notable works include *Lincoln: A Photobiography*, which won the Newbery Medal in 1988, and several others that received critical acclaim, such as *The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane* and *Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery*. Freedman was known for his innovative use of photographs in storytelling and for addressing socially conscious themes in his books. Over his lifetime, he received numerous awards, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and the National Humanities Medal. He continued to write until his passing on March 16, 2018, leaving behind a legacy of over sixty books that have educated and inspired readers on various historical topics.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Russell Freedman
- Born: October 11, 1929
- Birthplace: San Francisco, California
- Died: March 16, 2018
- Place of death: New York City, New York
Biography
Russell Bruce Freedman was born on October 11, 1929, in San Francisco, California. His father, Louis N. Freedman, was sales manager of the American branch of the British publisher Macmillan and his mother, Irene Gordon, was an actress. Freedman’s father frequently invited authors such as John Steinbeck and Margaret Mitchell to dinner, and the young Freedman grew up surrounded by the literati of the day. In an interview conducted by Karen Biel for the Spring 2004 issue of Connections: The Newsletter of the Children’s Literature Connection, Freedman said he began to write in elementary school and credited his fifth-grade teacher with encouraging him to write.
Freedman attended San Jose State College from 1947 to 1949 and received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1951. For the next two years, he served in the Counter Intelligence Corps of the US Army, deployed in Korea.
When Freedman returned from the war, he began a career as a writer. He was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in San Francisco from 1953 until 1956, when he moved to New York City and wrote television advertisements for the J. Walter Thompson Company for four years. In 1961, he began a two-year stint as a staff member of the Columbia Encyclopedia at Columbia University.
In 1961, Freedman also published Teenagers Who Made History, the book that launched his career as an nonfiction author for juvenile readers. He was inspired to write the book after he read a newspaper article about a boy who invented a Braille typewriter at age sixteen, the same age at which Louis Braille invented his alphabet for the blind. In the Connections interview, Freedman described the 1950s and early 1960s as a literary apprenticeship: "I learned more about writing in my first day at the Associated Press than I did in four years at the University of California as an English major. It taught me about respecting sources and about having at least three sources for every assertion."
From 1964 to 1965, Freedman worked for Roller-coaster Educational Corporation while writing a book about space travel and a biography of Jules Verne. In the 1970s, Freedman became a full-time freelance writer, producing a successful series of books on the animal kingdom, some coauthored with Jim Morris, that began with How Animals Learn in 1969 and ended with Sharks in 1985. From 1969 to 1986, he also taught writing workshops at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
While his animal books revealed the power of photographs, Freedman employed photographs even more ingeniously in Immigrant Kids, a photobiography in which he paired period photographs with the historically accurate description of an immigrant child’s life in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. He used a similar format in Lincoln: A Photobiography. This book received a Golden Kite Honor Award citation from the Society of Children’s Book Writers in 1987, a Jefferson Cup Award, and, most notably, the prestigious Newbery Medal from the American Library Association in 1988. Freedman would also earn Newbery Honors for The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane (1992), Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery (1994; also a winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award), and The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights (2005; also winner of the Robert F. Sibert Medal).
Freedman’s books are known for their thorough research. He often traveled to historic sites and mined primary source material, such as personal letters, to present an accurate, compelling, and fair picture of a historical figure and era—a stark contrast from the typical dramatized and simplistic style of earlier history works for children. However, his works were not always based wholly in unbiased fact. For example, in discussing In Defense of Liberty: The Story of America’s Bill of Rights (2003) for the Connections interview, Freedman, a longtime supporter of many social justice causes, debunked the idea of complete objectivity in such a book: "I attempted to give both sides of every issue in this book, but as one reviewer pointed out, it’s obvious where I stand on the Second Amendment, for example." Later books that explored socially conscious themes included Vietnam: A History of the War (2016) and We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler (2016).
Along with the Newbery Medal, Freedman received many other honors and awards over the course of his career. In 1984, he won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame for Children of the Wild West. In 1998, the American Library Association presented him with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (renamed in 2018 as the Children's Literature Legacy Award) to honor the entire body of his work. His book Children of the Great Depression received the 2006 Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English. In 2007 Freedman was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities and President George W. Bush. His book Lafayette and the American Revolution earned a Sibert Honor in 2011, as did We Will Not Be Silent in 2017.
Freedman married Evans Chan, a filmmaker who had been his partner for many years, in 2013. He continued writing well into his eighties, ultimately authoring over sixty books. In early March 2018 he suffered several strokes, which led to his death on March 16 of that year. He was eighty-eight years old.
Bibliography
Genzlinger, Neil. "Russell Freedman, 88, Writer of History for Young Readers, Dies." The New York Times, 29 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/obituaries/russell-freedman-88-writer-of-history-for-young-readers-dies.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.
Ingall, Marjorie. "A Children's Book Author Who Never Lied to Kids." Tablet, 17 Aug. 2018, www.tabletmag.com/scroll/268796/a-childrens-book-author-who-never-lied-to-kids. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.
Maughan, Shannon. "Obituary: Russell Freedman." Publishers Weekly, 20 Mar. 2018, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/76361-obituary-russell-freedman.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.
Scheuerman, Daniel. "Russell Freedman." National Endowment for the Humanities, 2007, www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/russell-freedman. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.
Yorio, Kara. "Russell Freedman Brought History to Life for Kids." School Library Journal, 21 Mar. 2018, www.slj.com/?detailStory=russell-freedman-brought-history-life-kids. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.