Our Archival Photo of the Week features award-winning author, Virginia Hamilton outside of her first New York City apartment around 1960. Born in 1934, Hamilton grew up in Ohio. She moved to New York City in 1958, working as a museum receptionist, cost accountant, and nightclub singer, while she pursued her dream of being a published writer. She studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research under Hiram Haydn, one of the founders of Atheneum Press. It was also in New York that Virginia met poet Arnold Adoff. They were married in 1960. Arnold worked as a teacher, and Virginia was able to devote her full attention to writing until her two children came along. The couple moved to a below-street-level single room on Jane Street and, Adoff says, “thought we were such hot stuff, living in the Village and taking our places in that wonderful and long line of writers banging their heads against the wall . . . but in style.”

In 1967, Hamilton published her first novel, Zeely, which was an instant success, winning a Nancy Bloch Award and was recognized as a Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. The next year, she published The House of Dies Drear (1968), a mystery that won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. By 1969, Hamilton, her husband and her two young children moved back to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Hamilton was able to devote more time to writing, and she published a book almost every year. Although Hamilton focused on writing books for young adults and children, she experimented in a wide variety of genres. Other notable books include The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974), Cousins (1990), and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982).  In 2002, Hamilton passed away after a long battle with breast cancer.