Reynolds Naylor, Phyllis

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor was born January 4, 1933, in Anderson, Indiana, to a strongly religious family with conservative, midwestern values. Because her father was a traveling salesman, Naylor moved frequently and considered no one place “home.” During the summers, her family vacationed either in Iowa, where her mother’s parents lived, or in Maryland, where her father’s parents lived. Her paternal grandfather was a church pastor and her grandmother a midwife. Therefore, during her visits to Marbury, Maryland, she came into contact with many people and had a lively time.

Though she grew up during the Depression and her family did not have a lot of money, Naylor stated that she never felt poor because her family owned good books. Her parents enjoyed reading stories to the children–her father would imitate the characters in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer–and her mother read to them every evening, “almost until we were old enough to go out on dates, though we never would have admitted this to anyone.”

When Naylor was sixteen she began writing stories and poems for a church paper at the invitation of a former Sunday school teacher. Encouraged, she decided to sell short stories to widely read magazines. In 1951, at the age of eighteen, she got married, and after graduating from Joliet Junior College, she moved with her husband to Chicago. This marriage ended in divorce and in May, 1960 she married Rex Naylor, a speech pathologist.

Naylor returned to school to become a clinical psychologist, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from American University. She knew she wanted to be a full-time writer, however, and thus did not pursue graduate study. Instead she began a family and wrote a column about family life that was published in church magazines. She also began a column for teenagers that would continue for twenty-five years. In 1965 she published her first book, a short story collection called The Galloping Goat and Other Stories.

Naylor has had over 80 books published for children and young people and four books for adults. Her children’s book, Shiloh, was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1992 and was also named a Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association and a Young Adult Choice by the International Reading Association. She has subsequently written Shiloh Season and Saving Shiloh to complete the trilogy. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband and two cats. Their sons, Jeffrey and Michael, are grown. Mrs. Naylor enjoys going to the ocean, hiking, and riding a bicycle. She also likes to go to the theater, to sing, and to sample new restaurants. But most of all, she loves to write, so that’s what she does most of the time.

          – taken from Something About the Author, How I Came to Be a Writer,
             and publicity material from Simon & Schuster

Quotes from Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

“The idea of being a writer never entered my mind when I was growing up. An occupation, I knew, was something that took years of preparation and hard work and writing was simply too much fun. So I decided on becoming a teacher, an actress, an opera singer, a tap dancer, or a missionary.”

       – from How I Came to Be a Writer

“Each day I would rush home from school to see if the wastebasket held any discarded paper that had one side blank. We were not allowed to use new sheets of paper for our writing or drawing, so books had to be done on used paper. I would staple these sheets together and sometimes paste a strip of colored paper over the staples to give it the appearance of a bound book. Then I would grandly begin my story, writing the words at the top of each page and drawing an accompanying picture on the bottom. Sometimes I typed the story before stapling the pages. And sometimes I even cut old envelopes in half and pasted them on the inside covers as pockets, slipping an index card in each one, like a library book, so I could check it out to friends and neighbors. I was the author, illustrator, printer, binder, and librarian, all in one.”

  – Something About the Author, V.66

“I can never understand why people who have not seen me for a while ask if I am still writing. They might as well ask if I am still breathing. Writing is something I have been doing all my life. Even before I could put words down on paper, I was making up stories. There is no other job, I’m sure, that I would enjoy as much, for in my books I can be anyone I please–old or young, boy or girl. I can do wildly exciting things I would never dream of doing in real life, and can experience sorrows and terrors that I have always been curious about.”

  -from Fifth Book of Junior Authors

“There are two sons and a husband in my own family, and they all enjoy reading and criticizing my books. They often crop up in my stories–a mannerism here, a problem there, the shape of a chin, perhaps. . . . Of course you would never recognize them, for all of my characters are made up of little bits and pieces of many different people.”

   – ibid

“On my deathbed, I am sure, I will gasp, ‘But I still have five more books to write!’ . . . I will go on writing, because an idea in the head is like a rock in the shoe; I just can’t wait to get it out.”

– How I Came to Be a Writer

 

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