Marguerite de Angeli

American novelist

Marguerite de Angeli (March 14, 1889 – June 16, 1987) was an American writer and illustrator of children's books including the 1950 Newbery Award winning book The Door in the Wall. She wrote and illustrated twenty eight of her own books, and illustrated more than three dozen books and numerous magazine stories and articles for other authors.

De Angeli was born Marguerite Lofft in Lapeer, Michigan, Her grandfather was the town blacksmith. In 1902, her family moved to West Philadelphia, where she spent her most formative years. She entered high school in 1904, but a year later, at age fifteen, began to sing professionally as contralto in a Presbyterian choir for $1 a week. She soon withdrew from high school for more musical training. There, in 1921, Marguerite started to study drawing under her mentor, Maurice Bower. In 1922, Marguerite began illustrating a Sunday School paper and was soon doing illustrations for magazines such as The Country Gentleman, Ladies' Home Journal, and The American Girl, besides illustrating books for authors including Helen Ferris, Elsie Singmaster, Cornelia Meigs, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Her last child, Maurice Bower de Angeli, was born in 1928, seven years before the 1935 publication of her first book, Ted and Nina Go to the Grocery Store. The de Angeli family moved frequently, returning to Pennsylvania and living north of Philadelphia in Jenkintown, west of Philadelphia in the Manoa neighborhood of Havertown, on Carpenter Lane in Germantown, Philadelphia, on Panama Street in Center City, Philadelphia, in an apartment near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in a cottage in Green Lane, Pennsylvania. They also maintained a summer cabin on Money Island in Toms River, New Jersey. Marguerite's husband died in 1969, eight months before their 60th wedding anniversary.

In 1971, two years after her husband died, de Angeli published her autobiography, Butter at the Old Price. In 1981, Lapeer's public library was renamed the Marguerite deAngeli Branch of the Lapeer District Library.