Barbara Cooney was born August 6, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, and spent many summers in Maine as a child. She graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in 1938, traveled in Europe in the 1930s, and attended in the Art Students League in New York City in 1940; she also served in the Women's Army Corps during World War II. Barbara Cooney began working as a free-lance artist and illustrator in 1938, and illustrated her first book, Bertil Malmberg's Ake and His World, in 1940. The following year she wrote and illustrated The King of Wreck Island. Throughout her long career, Barbara Cooney has juggled the roles of wife, mother, writer , and artist, and has always sought to maintain artistic integrity and technical skills that make her work so popular and highly praised. Barbara Cooney believes that one should never write down to a child and while she may understate her technical abilities, critics have cited her attention to detail and the care she takes in her research, making sure the background and details are accurate in her stories regardless of their geographical or historical setting. Barbara Cooney has often drawn on her childhood memories of the New England landscape. She won her second Caldecott Award in 1980 for Ox-Cart Man, an historical picture book set in rural New England. Barbara Cooney won the 1959 Caldecott Award for Chanticleer and the Fox, an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer's story. Both works demonstrate Barbara Cooney's love for a good story and her interweaving of text and illustrations. Barbara Cooney works in a variety of media and her books include adaptations of fairy and folk tales, and Greek and Roman myths, always making sure that story and pictures merge to create a work children can enjoy. Barbara Cooney received the Kerlan Award in 1992.