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Anne Emery

Anne (McGuigan) Emery (1907-1984) was a popular author of junior novels during the post-World War II decades. Her novels, aimed at young teenage girls, used typical junior-novel themes such as dating, popularity, and personal adjustment to address larger ethical issues, ranging from cheating to urban and Appalachian poverty, anti-Semitism, and anti-Nisei sentiment; Tradition, her first novel for teens, published by Vanguard Press in DATE, focused a heroine who works with her high-school classmates, in the name of democracy, to oppose prejudice against new students who happen to have come from a Japanese internment camp. She also wrote several books of historical fiction and biographies of Herbert Hoover and Joan of Arc for young people.

Emery was born in Fargo, North Dakota on September 1, 1907 but lived in the Chicago area for most of her life. Her father was a professor of [ ] at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She attended Northwestern University and received a BA in 1928, and a certificate from the University of Grenoble France in 1929. She was a teacher in the Evanston Public Schools from 1929-1939, and later was a faculty member of the Northwestern Writers Workshop from 1964-1965. She was also a member of the Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Society of Midland Authors and Theta Sigma Phi.

In 1933 she married John Douglas Emery, who served as mayor of Evanston, Illinois from DATE to DATE. Emery had five children, four girls and one boy, and their interests and experiences, along with Emery's own reading experiences as a teenager, shaped her writing. Emery died on July 4, 1987 in Menlo Park, California; John Emery died in 1993. ArchiveGrid record for Evanston Historical Society holdings

Her papers are held at the University of Oregon's Special Collections and Archives (finding aid here) and at the Evanston Historical Society.

Other Publications
from U of OR finding aid: "Her work is primarily about teen girls and the issues they confront during adolescence, such as peer pressure, friendships and dating, sex, drugs and finding one’s identity. However, Emery was also interested in historical fiction, and her first published work, Bright Horizons, dramatizes the conflicts over ratification of the American Constitution. Her other historical fiction novels include Carey’s Fortune, which is set during the presidential election of 1800, and American Friend, a novel about Herbert Hoover."

BOOKS WRITTEN

OTHER PUBLICATIONS