Mildred D. Taylor
Mildred Delois Taylor was born on September 13, 1943, in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where her family had relocated as part of the Great Migration. Her father, Wilbert Taylor, was a gifted storyteller who shared with his children the oral history of their family’s experiences in the Deep South, the indignities and terrors of life under segregation, and the stubborn dignity with which successive generations of the Taylor family had preserved their self-respect and their land in the face of racial violence and economic oppression. These family stories, rich in specific detail and moral seriousness, would become the primary material of Taylor’s fiction. She studied at the University of Toledo before earning a master’s degree from the University of Colorado School of Journalism.
Taylor’s debut, Song of the Trees (1975), introduced the Logan family of rural Mississippi, and its sequel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), became one of the most celebrated and important novels in American children’s literature. The novel follows nine-year-old Cassie Logan across a single year in 1930s Mississippi, as her family fights to hold onto their land in the face of economic pressure, racial terror, and the grinding violence of Jim Crow. Taylor’s narrative is distinguished by its unflinching historical honesty, its refusal to soften or sentimentalise the realities of racism, and the extraordinary vividness and dignity with which the Logan family is rendered. The Logans are a family of great intelligence, pride, and moral seriousness, and Cassie’s narration captures the specific anguish of a child slowly comprehending the full dimensions of the world’s injustice.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry won the Newbery Medal in 1977, and the Logan family saga continued through Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), The Road to Memphis (1990), The Land (2001, winner of the PEN/Norma Klein Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and other novels. Taylor was awarded the inaugural Children’s Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association in 1988 in recognition of her substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.
Taylor’s body of work has been described by educators and critics as essential reading for understanding American history and the African American experience. Her insistence on historical accuracy, her refusal of consolatory narrative, and her loving, monumental portrait of the Logan family have secured her a permanent place among the most significant American novelists of the twentieth century, for readers of any age.
