Virginia Lee Burton

About Virginia Lee Burton

Virginia Lee Burton (30 August 1909 to 15 October 1968) was an American author and illustrator of children's picture books, best known for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) and The Little House (1942), which won the 1943 Caldecott Medal.

Born in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, the daughter of MIT dean Alfred E. Burton and the poet Lena Yates, she grew up partly in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. She returned to Massachusetts in 1928, sketched for the Boston Transcript, and in 1930 joined a drawing class at the Boston Museum School taught by the sculptor George Demetrios, whom she married in 1931. Her first published illustrations were for Arna Bontemps's Sad-Faced Boy (Houghton Mifflin, 1937), and Houghton Mifflin remained her publisher. Her own books include Choo Choo, Calico the Wonder Horse (1941), Katy and the Big Snow (1943), Maybelle the Cable Car (1952) and Life Story (1962). She also illustrated The Song of Robin Hood (1947) and Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes (1949). She usually drew the pictures first, often in scratchboard, and wrote the text afterwards.

From her home at Folly Cove in Gloucester, Massachusetts, she founded and led the Folly Cove Designers, a group that printed linoleum-block designs on fabric. She died of lung cancer in Boston.

For collectors

The Houghton Mifflin first editions of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) and The Little House (1942) are her key books.