Rosemary Wells

about the author

Rosemary Wells

Bestselling Illustrator and Author of the Max and Ruby Series

Born in New York City, Rosemary Wells grew up in a house “filled with books, dogs, and nineteenth-century music.” Her childhood years were spent between her parents’ home near Red Bank, New Jersey, and her grandmother’s rambling stucco house on the Jersey Shore. Most of her sentimental memories, both good and bad, stem from that place and time. Her mother was a Russian ballet dancer and her father a playwright and actor.

Wells says, “Both my parents flooded me with books and stories. My grandmother took me on special trips to the theater and museums in New York. When I was two years old I began to draw, and they saw right away the career that lay ahead of me and encouraged me every day of my life. As far back as I can remember, I did nothing but draw.”

A self-proclaimed “poor student,” Wells attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after finishing high school. It was, she recalls, “a bastion of abstract expressionism, an art form that brought to my mind things I don’t like to eat, fabrics that itch against the skin, divorce, paper cuts, and metallic noises.”

Without her degree, she left school at 19, married, and began a fledgling career as a book designer with a Boston textbook publisher. When her husband, Tom, applied to the Columbia School of Architecture two years later, the couple moved to New York, where she began her career in children’s books, working as a designer at Macmillan. It was there that she published her first book, an illustrated edition of Gilbert & Sullivan’s I Have a Song to Sing-O.

Wells’s career as an author and illustrator spans more than thirty years and 200 books. She has won numerous awards, and has given readers such unforgettable characters as Max and Ruby, Noisy Nora, and Yoko. She has also given Mother Goose new life in two enormous, definitive editions, published by Candlewick. Wells wrote and illustrated Unfortunately Harriet, her first book with Dial, in 1972. One year later she wrote the popular Noisy Nora. “The children and our home life have inspired, in part, many of my books. Our West Highland white terrier, Angus, had the shape and expressions to become Benjamin and Tulip, Timothy, and all the other animals I have made up for my stories.” Her daughters, Victoria and Beezoo, were constant inspirations, especially for the now famous Max board book series. “Simple incidents from childhood are universal,” Wells says. “The dynamics between older and younger siblings are common to all families.”

But Wells’s books are not simple transcriptions from the family circle. In reply to frequent audience questions about the origin of her material, she notes, “It’s a writer’s job to have ideas.” Sometimes the spark comes from what she reads or hears, as in the case of Mary on Horseback, her story based on the life of Mary Breckinridge, who founded the Frontier Nursing Service. Timothy Goes to School grew from an incident in which her daughter was teased for wearing the wrong clothes to a Christmas concert. As with Angus, her dogs Lucy and Snowy become drawing models for expression and body position. She admits, “I put into my books all of the things I remember. I am an accomplished eavesdropper in restaurants, trains, and gatherings of any kind. These remembrances are jumbled up and changed because fiction is always more palatable than truth. Memories become more true as they are honed and whittled into characters and stories.”

Her writing career has been a “pure delight,” she says. “I regret only that I cannot live other lives parallel to my own. Writing is a lonely profession and I am a gregarious sort of person. I would like someday to work for the FBI. A part of me was never satisfied with years of tennis. I still yearned to play basketball.”

 

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Featured Book

Max and Ruby's Bedtime Book Buy Now

Max and Ruby's Bedtime Book

"The detailed pictures, composed of ink, watercolor, colored pencil, and collage, include lots of white space that highlights the sibling's stand-offs, and it is the moments of meanness and rebellion that make the story’s snugly conclusion so cozy."

—Booklist

Speaking Topics

  • A Talk with Rosemary Wells

    In an engaging and interactive lecture specially tailored to each audience, Rosemary Wells discusses the Max and Ruby series,”Read to Your Bunny,” The Importance of Books in the Lives of Young Children, and Booking Up Your Kids. 
     

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