Virginia Sorensen
Virginia Sorensen was a prominent American author known for her fiction aimed at both adults and children, deeply rooted in her diverse cultural backgrounds, including Mormon, Danish, and Native American traditions. Born in Provo, Utah, in 1912, she grew up in a Danish-American community, where stories of the Mormon migration to Utah in the mid-19th century significantly influenced her writing. Sorensen's works often reflect her personal experiences and travels, which included living in various states and countries such as California, Mexico, Denmark, and Morocco.
Her literary contributions include notable novels like "A Little Lower than the Angels," "The House Next Door," and the award-winning "Miracles on Maple Hill," which earned her the Newbery Medal. With a career that spanned several decades, she also received the Children's Book Award from the Child Study Association of America. Sorensen's storytelling is characterized by a gentle sophistication, often set against rich historical backdrops. She passed away in 1991 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, leaving behind a legacy that continues to resonate in children's literature. Her papers are preserved in notable collections at Boston University and the University of Minnesota.
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Subject Terms
Virginia Sorensen
Author
- Born: February 17, 1912
- Birthplace: Provo, Utah
- Died: 1991
- Place of death: Hendersonville, North Carolina
Biography
Author Virginia Sorensen’s fiction for both adults and children bears the indelible stamp of the many places she lived during her long career as a writer. In her gentle but sophisticated stories of family traditions, often in historical settings, she explores the Mormon, Danish, and Native American backgrounds with which she was most familiar.
She grew up hearing stories about the Mormon odyssey from Illinois to Utah in 1856. She was born in Provo, Utah, in 1912 to Claud E. Eggertsen and Helen El Deva (Blackett) Eggertsen. Her parents were Mormons of Danish descent, and they had settled in Monti, in the Sanpete Valley in Utah, an area known for its cohesive settlement of Danish Americans. She drew upon stories from her childhood to create such Mormon-themed novels as her first novel, A Little Lower than the Angels, the children’s novel The House Next Door, and Many Heavens.
After receiving her B.S. degree in 1934 from Brigham Young University, she married her first husband, English professor Frederick Sorensen. They quickly had two children, Elizabeth and Frederick. She and her husband moved to Palo Alto, California, where she pursued graduate studies.
Throughout her marriage to Sorensen, which ended in divorce, and later in her marriage to novelist and travel writer Alec Waugh, her life revolved around travel, writing, and teaching. With her first husband, she traveled to and lived in various university towns in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Missouri, where she also occasionally taught creative writing. Many of these settings informed her novels, including the Pennsylvania settings of Plain Girl and the Newbery Medal- winning Miracles on Maple Hill.
Sorensen drew upon her knowledge of the Yaqui Indians of the Southwest for her novel The Proper Gods and upon Colorado settings for her novel The Neighbors, about a ranch family. She also traveled abroad on two Guggenheim fellowships, first to Mexico in 1946 and then to Denmark in 1954. She took advantage of her travels to gather background material for future novels. With her second husband, she traveled even farther abroad, spending several years in Morocco. The couple later lived in both Florida and North Carolina.
Although Sorensen wrote for both adults and children, it is perhaps for her children’s books that she is best remembered. She won the Children’s Book Award of the Child Study Association of America in 1955 for Plain Girl and the Newbery Medal for Miracles on Maple Hill, the book for which she is best known. Sorensen died in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in 1991. Her collected papers reside in the Special Collection at Boston University and in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota.