author
Florence Crannell Means
1891–1980
A pioneering writer for young readers, she brought lives rarely centered in children’s books into clear, compassionate focus. Best known for The Moved-Outers, she wrote with a strong sense of fairness and curiosity about the world around her.
1 Audiobook
Across the Fruited Plain
by Florence Crannell Means
About the author
Born in Baldwinsville, New York, on May 15, 1891, Florence Crannell Means became an American writer of books for children and young adults. She is especially remembered for writing about people and communities that were often overlooked in juvenile fiction, an approach that set her apart from many of her contemporaries.
Her best-known book is The Moved-Outers (1945), a novel about the wartime forced removal and incarceration of a Japanese American family. The book received a Newbery Honor and also won the Child Study Association of America Children's Book Award. Sources on her life also place her for many years in Colorado, where she continued her writing career and remained a notable literary figure.
Means died on November 19, 1980, in Boulder, Colorado. Today she is often remembered not just for the number of books she wrote, but for her effort to widen young readers' understanding of other people's lives.