Virginia Hamilton, an internationally recognized writer for children whose work celebrated the African-American experience as an essential component of American life, died Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio. She was 65 and lived in nearby Yellow Springs.
The cause was breast cancer, said Kris Moran, director of publicity for Scholastic, her publisher.
Ms. Hamilton wrote more than 35 books in many genres that spanned picture books and folk stories, mysteries and science fiction, realistic novels and biography.
Among her best-known works are “The People Could Fly” (1985), “The Planet of Junior Brown” (1971) and “Many Thousand Gone: African Americans From Slavery to Freedom” (1993).
She won a National Book Award in 1975 for her novel “M.C. Higgins, the Great.” The book also received a Newbery Medal, the first to a black writer. In 1995 she became the first children’s author to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.
Woven into her books is a concern with memory, tradition and generational legacy, especially as they helped define the lives of American blacks from the days of slavery onward. Ms. Hamilton described her work as “liberation literature.”
Virginia Esther Hamilton grew up on the small farm in Yellow Springs that had been her family’s since the 1850s. She later returned there with her husband and children.
Her grandfather, Levi Perry, was born a slave in Virginia and crossed the Ohio River to freedom.
Ms. Hamilton’s first book, “Zeely,” appeared in 1967. At the time the few children’s books about black people were mainly “problem” novels, which threw into sharp relief issues such as segregation and poverty.
“Zeely” was a radical departure. She forsook gritty urban drama for a pastoral tale of enchantment whose characters happened to be black.
