Милтон Мелцер: Американ тарихшысы және балалар әдебиетінің қайырлысы

American historian and author
Milton Meltzer (May 8, 1915 – September 19, 2009) was an American historian and author best known for his nonfiction books on Jewish, African American, and American history. Since the 1950s, he was a prolific author of history books in the children's literature and young adult literature genres, having written nearly 100 books. Meltzer was an advocate for human rights, as well as an adjunct professor for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He won the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his career contribution to American children's literature in 2001. Meltzer died of esophageal cancer in 2009.

Meltzer was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to Benjamin and Mary Meltzer, semi literate immigrants from Austria Hungary. One of three sons, Meltzer was the only child to graduate from high school, furthering his education at Columbia University from 1932 to 1936, he had to drop out of college before graduating to support his family after his father died of cancer. Meltzer was a staunch advocate for human rights, and much of his work he claimed was his way of speaking out against injustices and dictatorships. After serving during the war, Meltzer became a writer for the CBS radio broadcasting network and then took an executive position with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Meltzer most recently lived in New York City where he died at the age of 94 from esophageal cancer. Many of his personal writings, manuscripts, and papers, including letters, are now housed in the University of Oregon Special Collections, and are available to the public.

Meltzer's books often chronicled struggles for freedom, such as the American Revolution, the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century United States, and the movement against antisemitism. He wrote several biographies, including ones of Langston Hughes and Thomas Jefferson. Though most of his books are nonfiction he wrote two historical fiction novels, The Underground Man and Tough Times. Meltzer co authored with Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes the book A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, which was published in 1956. He also collaborated with Hughes on Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the African American in the Performing Arts, though Hughes passed shortly after the book went to the press. In 1981 he was an American Book Award finalist for All Times, All Peoples: A World History of Slavery. Meltzer's Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust was the 1976 recipient of the Boston Globe Horn Book Award in the non fiction category and winner of the National Jewish Book Award. He won the Boston Globe Horn Award in 1983 for Jewish Americans: A History in Their own Words, 1650 1950.