Holling Clancy Holling

About Holling Clancy Holling

Holling Clancy Holling (1900-1973) was an American author and illustrator best known for Paddle-to-the-Sea (1941), a Caldecott Honor book, and for later books such as Tree in the Trail, Seabird and Pagoo.

He was born Holling Allison Clancy on 2 August 1900 in Jackson County, Michigan, and graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1923. He then worked in the taxidermy department of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and in anthropology under Ralph Linton. He married Lucille Webster, who worked with him on many of his illustrations, and soon afterwards taught art on the first University World Cruise, sponsored by New York University. He also wrote and drew a Sunday comic strip, The World Museum, which included cut-out dioramas.

His early books include Sun and Smoke (1923), Little Big Bye-and-Bye (1926), Claws of the Thunderbird (1928), the Book of Indians (1935) and the Book of Cowboys (1936). Houghton Mifflin of Boston published Paddle-to-the-Sea in 1941, the story of a carved toy canoe travelling from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Tree in the Trail (1942), Seabird (1948), Minn of the Mississippi (1951), A World Is Born (1955) and Pagoo (1957) followed. Seabird was a Newbery runner-up and won a Commonwealth Club of California award, Minn of the Mississippi was also a Newbery runner-up, and Pagoo earned the couple a Southern California Council on Literature award. Holling died on 7 September 1973.

For collectors

Paddle-to-the-Sea was a Caldecott Honor book in 1942 and received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1962. It was first published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1941. A 1966 National Film Board of Canada short based on the book, directed by Bill Mason, was nominated for an Academy Award.