Lois Lenore Lenski Covey (October 14, 1893 – September 11, 1974) was a Newbery Medal-winning author and illustrator of picture books and children's literature.

[3] Lenski also provided illustrations for books by other authors, including the first edition of The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper (1930), and the first four volumes of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series (1940-1943).

[8] On June 8, 1921, immediately after her return from Italy, Lenski married Arthur Covey, a muralist who had been one of her instructors at the School of Industrial Art and for whom she had worked as an assistant on mural projects before she left for London.

[7] Covey, who was 16 years older than Lenski, expected his wife to take full responsibility for the household and children even if doing so meant that she would have no time for creative work.

[10] As Lenski progressed in her literary and artistic career, her family and home life served as important sources of inspiration for her work.

Two of the first books she wrote and illustrated, Skipping Village (1927) and A Little Girl of 1900 (1928), drew upon her childhood in small-town Ohio, which she idealized, describing it in her autobiography as "simple, sincere, and wholesome.

Beginning in 1959, her achievements were recognized with honorary doctorates from Wartburg College (1959), UNC-Greensboro (1962), and Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where her father had once taught (1966).

[13] In London she illustrated three children's books for the publisher John Lane, including new editions of two stories by Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame.

[17][18] Until the mid-1940s Lenski continued to illustrate other authors' books as well as her own, working with writers including Maud Hart Lovelace, Watty Piper, and Hugh Lofting.

Lenski conducted extensive research for Phebe Fairchild and her subsequent historical and regional novels, including site visits and archival research in her quest to accurately present the physical settings, material culture, speech patterns, and other aspects of the daily lives of her protagonists, as well as their broader social and historical contexts.

[4][20] When Lenski and her family began to spend winters in the Southeastern United States during the early 1940s, she was struck by the differences between this part of the country and her familiar New England and Midwest.

[21][22] The following winter Lenski visited Lakeland, Florida, where she again befriended local people, conducted interviews and read about the area's history, and observed daily life around her, including the children who participated in the strawberry harvest.

The resulting book, Strawberry Girl (1945), told the story of a family from North Carolina who migrated to Florida at the turn of the twentieth century and their interactions with the region's "cracker" culture.

[23] By the time that Strawberry Girl won the Newbery Award in 1946, Lenski had begun to understand it, along with Bayou Suzette and her work in progress Blue Ridge Billy, about a musical boy living in the North Carolina mountains during the early twentieth century, as the beginning of a series of regional books representing a new direction in children's literature.

[24][25] Although the first three Regional books were historical novels, with Judy's Journey (1947) Lenski turned her attention to the contemporary issue of migrant labor.

Some of the books directly resulted from this correspondence; for example, in 1947 Lenski traveled to Mississippi County, Arkansas, after a class in the rural community of Yarbro heard her read aloud on the radio and invited her to visit.

Malone argues that this attitude reflected the broader patterns of documentary realism that came to prominence in American arts and letters during the Great Depression, especially through the work of WPA-affiliated artists and writers.

[31] Lenski often wrote dialogue in dialect form, explaining in the foreword to Blue Ridge Billy that "to give the flavor of a region, to suggest the moods of the people, the atmosphere of the place, speech cannot be overlooked."

"[25] Overall, she committed herself to transmitting the experiences of her informants without sanitizing them to remove sad or difficult material; she wrote that her child readers agreed with this decision, since "life is not all happy.

In her acceptance speech for the Newbery Award for Strawberry Girl, a book which includes a running conflict between the family of her heroine and their drunken, feckless and violent neighbor, Lenski stated that leaving out such things would "paint a false picture.

She wanted her books to convey a sense of tolerance and acceptance of difference, mutual respect, empathy and pride in the country's cultural richness.

Comparing them to other children's literature of the day, critics described Lenski's Regional books as "grim" because of their focus on the experiences of members of socially and economically marginalized groups in the United States.

By emphasizing accuracy and refusing to sanitize her stories, Lenski aligned herself with progressive librarians and educators who believed that children's literature should take a realistic approach to everyday life and promote increased social awareness in young readers.

Kathleen Hardee Arsenaut concludes that Lenski's "determined view that good character and loving families will invariably overcome social prejudice and economic injustice strikes the modern reader as naive and simplistic," and that her insistence on happy endings through "hopefulness, kindness and self-control" undermined her effectiveness as a purveyor of social realism and at times, as in the case of her work to publicize the conditions faced by migrant workers, an activist.