BETTY KOCH ERWIN PAPERS

de Grummond Children's Literature Collection
The University of Southern Mississippi

	Creator:	Betty Koch Erwin
	Title:	Betty Koch Erwin Papers
	Dates:	1950-1998
	Dates:	[bulk ca. 1955-ca. 1976]
	Quantity:	3.90 cubic feet (13 boxes)
	Identification:	DG1198

Biographical Note

Betty Koch Erwin was born in 1922 in Whitehall, Wisconsin to H. C. Koch, M.D., and his wife, Iolyn Chester. The family moved to Berlin, Wisconsin in 1936, immediately before she entered high school. She attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, and then the University of Wisconsin where she earned a B.A. in history and an M.D. She externed in Chicago, interned in Jersey City, New Jersey, and completed a residency in anesthesia at the University of Minnesota. While living in Minneapolis in 1950 she began to submit short stories for publication in periodicals. The two that she sold were outnumbered by rejection slips. In late 1950 she married Grant W. Erwin Jr., a flight navigator for Northwest Airlines, which moved the couple to Seattle in 1952. They remained in Seattle, where her husband became a mathematician for Boeing, from 1958 to 1986. They lived with their children on Capitol Hill, an older section of Seattle.

Erwin wrote stories for the amusement of her six children: Alice, Grant, Victoria, Anne, Daniel, and Helen. Encouraged by the family, she combined these stories into a fantasy novel, Aggie, Maggie, and Tish, in 1965. She used her children and three older women she had known in Whitehall as loose models for the characters. She also set the book in Wisconsin, using Whitehall as a model for the fictitious town, to teach her children about her childhood home. Erwin composed the manuscript using her children's names, changing them only before publication. Where's Aggie?, a sequel, appeared in 1967.

Erwin frequently turned to familiar sites and experiences for her writing. She placed The Summer Sleigh Ride (1966) and its sequels, Who Is Victoria? (1973) and The Stairway in the Tree (unpublished), in the same pastoral Wisconsin setting as her other fantasy novels. The plot of Go to the Room of the Eyes (1969) transpired in an older Seattle house closely modeled after the Erwin home. The book won the Dorothy Canfield Fisher award in 1971. Similarly, Erwin drew from her experience as a medical student in Chicago for portions of Behind the Magic Line (1969), a novel about an African-American family living in the slums of Chicago.

Erwin attempted to write as realistically as possible and, consequently, explored numerous serious issues in American life in the 1960s and 1970s. Her dismay over the limited portrayal of black families in children's literature motivated her composition of Behind the Magic Line. Her unpublished writings covered a wide range of modern problems: dysfunctional families, fear of nuclear weapons, urban decay, and decline in public schools. The Happy Room and the Psychic Investigator, the unpublished sequel to Go to the Room of the Eyes, explored teen angst in the early '70s and reflected the Erwin family's own troubles and the decline of the Capitol Hill section of Seattle. Similarly, the characters of March to the Dead Hills inhabit a post apocalyptic wasteland imposed by human conflict, greed, and indifference.

Erwin failed to publish anything after Who Is Victoria? in 1973, despite writing several children's novels, short stories, and a romance novel. She died of lung cancer in 1989.

Sources:
Compiled from sources within the Betty Koch Erwin Papers.

Scope and Content Note

The Betty Koch Erwin Papers contain manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, correspondence, contracts, photographs, and clippings created and accumulated by Betty Koch Erwin and her children between 1950 and 1998. Erwin's papers were created from her composition of six published children's books and several unpublished novels, short stories, and essays for both children and adults. The material is organized into three series: books, unpublished works, and personal papers.

The papers in the books series are arranged alphabetically by title and the material for each book is arranged chronologically in order of creation when known. Erwin wrote almost all of her manuscripts in a rather haphazard manner in spiral bound notebooks. Each notebook usually contains manuscript drafts for two or more works. Likewise, the manuscript for a single novel may span two or three notebooks. Notebooks containing manuscript material for a published novel have been placed with the papers of the novel in question; otherwise, notebooks are filed according to the bulk of their contents. Erwin's notebooks also contain drafts of letters that she composed and presumably sent to editors, fans, and others. Prominent in both her draft and actual correspondence are three children's book editors at Little, Brown & Co.: Helen Jones, Caroline Soule, and Casey Cameron.

Betty Erwin's unpublished works are organized into three subseries: novels, short stories, and essays. In each subseries, the papers are arranged alphabetically by title and the material for each composition is arranged chronologically in order of creation when known. Untitled works have been described by the processor to give a simple but adequate knowledge of their contents. The jumbled state of the manuscripts described for published works applies for unpublished works as well. Furthermore, Erwin's children occasionally wrote and drew in their mother's notebooks. The majority of Erwin's short stories and essays are undated and impossible to estimate a date of composition within a decade. Nevertheless, they do seem to span the whole of Erwin's writing life. The essays probably date from the 1970s and 1980s and are rich in autobiographical information.

The series of personal papers contains correspondence, royalty statements, clippings, and other records of Betty Erwin and her daughter, Helen Erwin Schinske. The correspondence passed primarily between Betty Erwin and her editors and between Helen Erwin Schinske and the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection.

Restrictions

Restrictions on Use

Noncirculating; available for research.

Copyright Restrictions

The collection is protected by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code). Reproductions can be made only if they are to be used for "private study, scholarship, or research." It is the user's responsibility to verify copyright ownership and to obtain all necessary permissions prior to the reproduction, publication, or other use of any portion of these materials, other than that noted above.

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

(Identify the item and cite the series), Betty Koch Erwin Papers, de Grummond Children's Literature Collection, University of Southern Mississippi Libraries.

Provenance

These papers were donated to the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection of the University of Southern Mississippi by Grant W. Erwin Jr. and Helen Erwin Schinske in 2000. After Betty Erwin's death, her daughter, Helen Erwin Schinske, arranged for June Hamilton, a library school student at the University of Washington, to organize the majority of the papers (see folder 13/15). The student's separation of published from unpublished works and novels from short stories among the unpublished works has been preserved, although unpublished essays now have been segregated and misidentified manuscripts now are in their proper places.

Processing Information

Processed by Hans Rasmussen, October 2001. Encoded into EAD Version 1.0 by Danielle L. Bishop. This finding aid is the product of a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Container Listing

Contact:
The de Grummond Children's Literature Collection
The University of Southern Mississippi
118 College Drive, #5148
Hattiesburg, MS 39406-0001
(601) 266-4349
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