Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg

(The second Medal was for The View from Saturday in 1997.) She also wrote several picture books featuring her grandchildren.

She was one of six authors to have won two Newbery Medals in their career. Konigsburg is the only author to ever have been awarded both a Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor in the same year (1968). Frankweiler and the Newbery Honor for her second book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. She was awarded the Newbery Medal for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. She also wanted to gently show kids that it’s okay not to conform. Growing up, she never read stories about grouchy fathers or headachy mothers or pushy ladies, and she sought to put characters like these into her books. In her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, she describes her motivation to write as the desire to make a record of suburban America in the “early autumn of the twentieth century,” especially the everyday lives of children and families. While the Konigsburg children were small, Elaine took art lessons, and once the youngest was in school, she began writing. She studied chemistry at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, becoming her family’s first college graduate. There she met her future husband, David Konigsburg, the plant owner’s brother. Though she was her high school’s valedictorian, Lobl didn’t know about scholarships (her school lacked a guidance counselor), so she earned money for college by working as a bookkeeper in a meat plant. Elaine Lobl was the daughter of Jewish immigrants who raised her and her two sisters in a small Pennsylvania mill town.

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg