Sydney Taylor (October 30, 1904 – February 12, 1978) was an American writer, known for her series of children's books about a Jewish-American family in New York during the early 20th century.
[1][2]: 6, 25 Her parents and eldest sister Ella had emigrated in 1901 to the United States and settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
[2]: 47 The Brenner family moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx in 1916, where Taylor attended Morris High School.
[2]: 98 In 1923, Taylor joined the Young People's Socialist League, motivated as much by social interests as political ones, where she met her future husband, Ralph Schneider.
[2]: 115–118 As a young adult, she attended Rand School of Social Science and vacationed several times at Tamiment, a socialist resort in Pennsylvania.
[2]: 151–158 Her summers were spent as counselor and administrator at Cejwin Camps in Port Jervis, New York, where she was known as "Aunt Syd".
She then tried to write about teenagers, but her magazine submissions were rejected several times and her book editor again advised her against pursuing that avenue.
[2]: ch.12 Taylor's book A Papa Like Everyone Else was written based on stories told to her by a close friend, as she was dying from cancer, about her childhood in Hungary.
Her publisher rejected both a sequel to Mr. Barney's Beard and another All-of-a-Kind Family book, and Taylor was reluctant to take her editor's advice to write problem novels.
[2]: ch.11 The final book in the series, Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family, was sold to E. P. Dutton in 1977, and was published in the spring of 1978, shortly after Taylor's death.
Because of their families' objections to the civil ceremony, Taylor continued to live with her parents until she and Ralph had a religious wedding two years later.