1874
Laura Ingalls Wilder (right) and family leave Wisconsin to settle on a 172-acre farm outside Walnut Grove. When their crops are destroyed by grasshoppers, they’re forced to move, but 50 years later, Wilder captures the drama in On the Banks of Plum Creek.
1909
New Ulm teenager Wanda Gág writes a 20-page illustrated story, “Robby Bobby in Mother Gooseland.” It’s published in the Junior Journal section of the Minneapolis Journal. She’s paid $50 for her work.
1928
Dora V. Smith becomes the first professor of children’s lit in the College of Education at the University of Minnesota.
1928
Gág, now an alum of the Minneapolis School of Art (later the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), writes and illustrates Millions of Cats. It’s considered a prototype of the modern children’s book.
1938
Wilder’s On The Banks of Plum Creek wins the Newbery Medal.
1940
Taking inspiration from the childhood adventures she and her best friend Frances “Bick” Kenney had growing up in Mankato, Maud Hart Lovelace writes Betsy-Tacy, the first in a series of 13 novels.
1949
Dr. Irvin Kerlan, an FDA scientist and U of M alum, donates his collection of children’s lit to the University of Minnesota. This seeds the Kerlan Collection, eventually comprising 100,000 children’s books with more than 1,700 authors.
1959
When Dr. Marguerite Rush Lerner asks her brother-in-law Harry Lerner to publish her stories about childhood diseases, Lerner Publishing is born in the Lumber Exchange Building.
1965
The Children’s Theatre Company is established in the lecture hall at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The first season adapts classic lit like Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, and A Christmas Carol.
1975
The inaugural Kerlan Award is given to kid-lit pioneers Marie Hall Ets, Marguerite Henry, and Elizabeth Coatsworth.
1984
Named after the classic French children’s movie by Albert Lamorisse, Red Balloon Bookshop opens on Grand Avenue in St. Paul.
1986
Kirsten Larson is one of the first three dolls produced by American Girl. Kirsten’s backstory would be familiar to Laura Ingalls Wilder: Coming from Sweden, she arrives in Minnesota Territory with her family in 1854.
1987
Minneapolis’s Gary Paulsen crafts classic teenage survival story Hatchet, featuring Brian Robeson, a protagonist whom readers will follow through four more novels. Paulsen wraps it up in 2001 with Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books.
1989
Dr. Jack Zipes, the world’s leading fairy tale scholar, joins the U of M as professor in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch. He teaches fairy tales, folklore, and children’s lit until his retirement in 2008.
1992
Wild Rumpus bookstore, replete with pet chickens and cats winding through its beautifully curated shelves of children’s books, opens in Linden Hills.
2000
While working in The Bookman, a Minneapolis book warehouse, Kate DiCamillo comes across The Watsons go to Birmingham. After she’s encouraged by Louise Erdrich to write her own children’s books, Because of Winn-Dixie is published.
2017
Minneapolis writer Kelly Barnhill, who’s open about being bullied as a child and working at a battered women’s shelter as a teen, channels these feelings into her fourth novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. She’s awarded the Newbery Medal.
2024
After years of rejections by agents and publishers, local elementary school teacher and viral Instagrammer Matt Eicheldinger’s initially self-published debut, Matt Sprouts and the Curse of the Ten Broken Toes, is finally certified as a New York Times bestseller.
2024
The University of Minnesota Press will publish We Miss You, George Floyd, a picture book by Shannon Gibney.
2025
The Minnesota Opera will adapt Ezra Jack Keats’s 1962 children’s book classic The Snowy Day for its stage.
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