Wallower, Lucille, 1910-1999

Lucille Wallower (married name Van Horn) was born in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania on July 27, 1910, and spent most of her life in the Harrisburg area. She attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Art (now University of the Arts) and the Traphagen School of Fashion. In addition to being a children's book author-illustrator, she spent six years as a fashion illustrator and worked as a children's librarian in the Harrisburg region for more than thirty years. Wallower began working as an illustrator in 1937 for the children's book publisher Albert Whitman & Company. She illustrated five books for Whitman before writing her first self-illustrated book, A Conch Shell for Molly (1940), which was a Junior Literary Guild selection. Wallower described her early books as "fiction with a historical background" but later transitioned into writing educational texts on Pennsylvania history. Working for the educational publishing house Penns Valley, Wallower wrote Pennsylvania Primer (1954) and All About Pennsylvania (1960) as well as more narrow "geographies" on the Pennsylvania Dutch and black history. She continued writing until 1991, publishing more than forty books, many of which were self-illustrated. Wallower died in Cambridge, New York on August 30, 1999.