Zena Sutherland, 86, whose enlightened consideration of what made proper material for children’s books expanded the genre and made her a sort of literary fairy godmother to generations of childhood readers in the United States, died of cancer Wednesday, June 12, in the University of Chicago Hospitals.
Mrs. Sutherland was a noted authority on children’s books, having written since the 1950s more than 30,000 book reviews for The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, the Chicago Tribune, the Saturday Review and other publications.
But she became a trusted source of advice on children’s books by discovering authors like Maurice Sendak–who wrote “Where the Wild Things Are” in the 1960s–and David Macauley–whose 1980s picture books “Castle” and “Cathedral” told sweeping tales of epic building projects–long before anybody else had heard of them.
An editor and reviewer of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books from 1958 until 1985, she also wrote monthly “Books for Young People” columns for the Saturday Review from 1966 until 1972, and she was children’s book editor and reviewer for the Tribune from 1972 until 1984.
She served on the award committees for prizes from the Newbery and Caldecott Awards to the National Book Award. She literally wrote the textbook on children’s books by revising “Children and Books,” first written by the late May Hill Arbuthnot, several times between 1969 and 1996.
Though in no need of securing her relevance, Mrs. Sutherland nonetheless proved her judgment remained acute in the late-1990s by predicting British author J.K. Rowling’s bespectacled would-be wizard Harry Potter would become a literary hit in the U.S. before even hitting bookshelves on this side of the Atlantic. The opinion was based solely, she said, on the advice of a pre-teen whose taste she respected.
“I first heard about this when a friend of mine–she and her husband are very literate people–heard of its success in England. Finally her husband was inspired to … get a copy from England. Their son was smitten by it, totally smitten,” Mrs. Sutherland told the Tribune in 1999. “I have very high regard for his literary taste–he just turned 12–so I said, `When he’s finished, can I read it?'”
“Oh, I loved it.”
Mrs. Sutherland “was so aware that children weren’t always sweet and smiling and happy, and that these stories can be about that,” said Hazel Rochman, editor of YA Books for Booklist, a reviewing journal of the American Library Association, and a former student of Mrs. Sutherland’s at the University of Chicago.
“She was enormously influential. She had a sense of childhood that wasn’t patronizing, or sentimental, or condescending, combined with a real literary sense,” Rochman said. “She was really able to open up the canon of childhood literature to a wide degree.”
Born in Winthrop, Mass., Mrs. Sutherland moved to Chicago as a child and graduated from the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1937 and a master’s degree in library science in 1966.
She had entered the program with the intention of becoming a medical librarian; reading to her own three children altered her focus, she later said.
Her glamorous demeanor and fierce irreverence made her an inspiring educator during her long career with the U. of C. library school, though she made her mark outside academia through book reviews in the industry and popular press.
In her reviews, friends said, she culled children’s books every bit as dispassionately as she weeded her Hyde Park gardens.
“She took the gloves off. Her reviews were like nothing before them,” said Roger Sutton, another of Mrs. Sutherland’s former students and editor of The Horn Book Magazine, a leading journal of children’s literature. Other reviewers of children’s books in the 1960s and 1970s may have been polite, or “would simply ignore children’s books they didn’t like,” he said. “Not Zena.”
Nevertheless, when she found such a book, she argued on its behalf no matter what other experts believed.
“When a reviewer sees more than 2,000 new books every year, she expects to find a number that are dreadful, many that are pedestrian, some that are useful, quite a few that are good, and a very few that are outstanding,” she told the Tribune in 1973–a statement underscoring both her dedication to the undertaking and her frustration with much of what she found. “It isn’t often that a book comes along that is so exciting that she’s dazzled.”
But those times, she went on to say, still occurred with regularity.
Mrs. Sutherland is survived by two sons, Stephen and Thomas Bailey; a daughter, Katherine Linehan; and seven grandchildren. Her second husband, Alec Sutherland, died in 1990.
