Ms. Byars’s award-winning children’s books, including “The Summer of the Swans” and “The Night Swimmers,” often dealt with abandonment. Betsy Byars, who drew from life to write award-winning children’s books that often portrayed young people grappling with abandonment, died on Feb. 26 at her home in Seneca, S.
C. She was 91. Her daughter, Nan Byars, said the cause was complications after a fall in November. Ms.
Byars’s more than 60 books, usually aimed at readers on the cusp of adolescence, included “The Summer of the Swans” (1970), which won the Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in children’s literature, and “The Night Swimmers” (1980), which won the National Book Award for children’s books. Ms. Byars told an audience at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1984 that she had found many of her characters by “going through life like a pickpocket — I do a lot of creative stealing,” she was quoted as saying by The Christian Science Monitor. She regularly placed her characters in tense situations, with a pronounced absence of adult support.
“Other authors have used the gimmick of getting rid of the parents, but none of them have done it with the zest I have,” Ms. Byars said. “I’ve sent them down turquoise mines, had them running from the F. B.
I. , and made them into country-western singers. ” “The Summer of the Swans,” about children who live with an aunt after their mother dies, follows an awkward adolescent girl’s search for her mentally disabled brother after he disappears. The novel, which Ms.
Byars wrote after volunteering as a tutor for mentally challenged children, conveys the insecurity and angst that plague the protagonist, Sara, along with her fear for her vanished brother, Charlie. Early in the book Sara tells Charlie, before he disappears, that it is the worst summer of her life, even though little has been outwardly different from summers past. “It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed,” Ms. Byars wrote.
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“The same stones, shaken, no longer made the same design. ” The characters in “The Night Swimmers” are practically orphaned after their mother dies, their father being a country singer who is rarely around. They are effectively raised by an older sister and spend nights sneaking into a neighbor’s pool, an activity that turns calamitous. Ms.
Byars’s other books include “Wanted … Mud Blossom” (1991), the last in a series of books about the Blossom family, which won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1992; and “The Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish” (1982), about a boy named Warren who daydreams about horror movies depicting a gigantic goldfish, all to escape the pain caused by his absent mother, who is on the run from the F. B. I.
““Ms.”
Byars’s straightforward narration lets pure gut feelings come through,” the children’s book author Marilyn Kaye wrote about “The Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish” in The New York Times Book Review in 1982. “The rationale for the mother’s behavior and her actual motives are never really explored, but that’s not important. The impact of Warren’s having to cope with the fact that he’s not the No. 1 priority in his mother’s life is important.
It’s not an easy concept to grasp, but he will eventually accept it, and survive. ” Betsy Alice Cromer was born on Aug. 7, 1928, in Charlotte, N. C.
, to George Cromer, a textile executive, and Nan (Rugheimer) Cromer, a homemaker. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from what was then Queens College of Charlotte, now Queens University of Charlotte, in 1950, the same year she married Edward Byars. She was an avid reader from a young age, but said she never considered writing until after she and Mr. Byars had moved to Illinois, where he pursued a graduate degree in engineering.
“I didn’t know anyone, I had two little kids, I had to do something,” Ms. Byars said in 1984. She began to write, contributing articles to The Saturday Evening Post, Look magazine and other publications before attempting books. She endured many rejections before her first book, “Clementine,” was published in 1962.
Ms. Byars’s other books include the Herculeah Jones mysteries; a memoir, “The Moon and I” (1991); and the Bingo Brown series, which followed the adventures of a boy by that name and addressed contemporary issues. She collaborated with two of her daughters, Betsy Duffey and Laurie Myers, on animal-themed books like “My Dog, My Hero” (2000). Ms.
Byars wrote on her website that she and her husband were both pilots and lived on what she described as an airstrip, with the bottom floor of their house acting as a hangar. In addition to her husband and daughters she is survived by a son, Guy Byars; nine grandchildren; and many great-grandchildren. Ms. Byars wrote on her website that the idea for “The Night Swimmers” came to her while she was visiting a friend who had a pool.
Her friend said that neighborhood children often sneaked in to swim, and she was worried someone would get hurt. “As soon as she said that, I thought, ‘The Night Swimmers,’” Ms. Byars wrote. “I could hardly wait to get home and type out a title page.
” “I was very pleased,” she continued. “I thought, Now all I need is 4,000 sentences and I’ve got a book.
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