Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, noted childrens writer and illustrator, was born February 10, 1930 in New York City. The second of three daughters, she was reared in small Pennsylvania towns . She attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) and received a BS in 1952. She was the first member of her family to go to college and, unaware of her talent for writing, she majored in chemistry, doing graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh. Her best-known titles included A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, which was an American Library Association Notable Childrens Book and National Book Award nominee, 1974; The Second Mrs. Giaconda and Fathers Arcane Daughter (both ALA Best Book for young adults); and Throwing Shadows (ALA Notable Childrens Book and American Book Award nomination, 1980). She won the Newbery Honor in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and the William Allen White Award in 1970. She won the Newbery Medal again in 1997 for The View from Saturday. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was adapted into a motion picture starring Ingrid Bergman in 1973 and later released as The Hideaways in 1974. It became a television film starring Lauren Bacall in 1995. Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was adapted for television as Jennifer and Me for NBC-TV in 1973. Konigsburg married David Konigsburg in 1952 and they had three children, Paul, Laurie, and Ross. She began writing when her youngest child started school. Konigsburg died in Falls Church, Virginia on April 19, 2013 from complications of a stroke that she had suffered a week prior. Konigsburg was 83.