Virginia hamilton early life

​Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the 1940s, Virginia Hamilton was lovingly embraced by the sights, sounds and smells of rural America, and by a big extended family of cousins, uncles, and aunts.

All these things would come into play in the children’s stories Hamilton would spin as an adult.

Virginia hamilton early life

Likely the biggest influence on Virginia Hamilton — whom Entertainment Weekly has called “a majestic presence in children’s literature” — was the fact that her own parents were storytellers. And what stories they told!

Hamilton’s maternal grandfather, Levi Perry, had escaped from slavery as a child in Virginia by crossing the Ohio River to freedom.

He had also had plenty of company in this resolve: Fully 50,000 slaves passed through Ohio or settled there during antebellum times, aided on the Underground Railroad by Shawnee Indians and white abolitionists. The aging homes where the escaped slaves hid became catacombed with secret passages and hidi