Phyllis Krasilovsky

Phyllis Krasilovsky
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer

Phyllis Krasilovsky (August 28, 1926 – February 27, 2014) was an American writer of children's books.

According to Krasilovsky, she started telling children's stories to her then-fiancé William M. Krasilovsky's five-year-old cousin, who was dying of cancer, and was first published after she walked into the Doubleday offices and insisted she must see an editor immediately before the couple left for Alaska. Children’s book editor Margaret Lesser heard the confrontation at the front desk, invited her in, read the manuscript and accepted The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes a few minutes later. Krasilovsky’s husband, at the time still a student at Cornell Law School, carefully studied the contract before approving.

Then they headed for Alaska. Their Crossley miniature car was so small, the wheel span was too narrow for the wooden tracks they occasionally encountered on the unpaved Alaska Highway. They had to hitch over the bridges with the car on the back of trucks. Phyllis subsequently used her power of persuasion in the Yukon to get them overnight lodging in a jail when they had nowhere else to stay. They were featured in an article in Ladies' Home Journal, "How America Lives: Newcomers to Alaska". The same issue also featured Phyllis in an article titled "Hair do's and don'ts".

Over the years Krasilovsky published 20 books for children, including The Very Little Girl and Scaredy Cat and perhaps best remembered, The Cow Who Fell in the Canal and Benny’s Flag. She described her The Popular Girls Club as "one of the first books about mean kids." Her books were translated into fourteen languages.

In the late 1960s, Krasilovsky was part of an initiative of eminent children’s book authors who pressed for foreign rights to their works to be negotiated separately from domestic publishing contracts. The first meeting, including Maurice Sendak, Margret Rey and H. A. Rey, Ruth Krauss, Remy Charlip, and Crockett Johnson, was held in her living room in Chappaqua, New York.

Beginning in 1970, Krasilovsky taught children’s literature at Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY, for three years; she was asked to lead the academic procession at graduation despite her lack of a college degree. As a child of the Depression, she had attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn on the commercial track to learn typing and stenography but also joined the debating team, whose medal she won in her graduating year and where she met her future husband.

The Krasilovskys already had four children, including Alexis Krasilovsky, now a filmmaker, and Jessica, author/illustrator of her own Doubleday children's book, when the success of her book The Cow Who Fell in the Canal led the Dutch government to reward her with a trip to Holland. When she wrote about it afterwards, it led to a second career as an independent travel writer. She produced articles such as "Yes, It’s Safe to Bring Your Children to Northern Ireland". Another, about traveling to countries such as Haiti with her suitcase packed with her children’s outgrown clothes to distribute there, won a Society of American Travel Writers Foundation award. Eventually she traveled to 147 countries. The Dutch honored her again in 1982 with a reception at the consulate in New York upon the publication of her book The First Tulips in Holland.

In addition to writing for many magazines, she wrote several op-eds for The New York Times and sometimes edited publications.

Krasilovsky was also noted for domestic accomplishments. The New York Times featured her house-swapping country mouse/city mouse family experience with one of her illustrators, Cyndy Szekeres. Another Times article presented how she utilized her freezer in her gourmet cooking.

Books

• The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes (1950) (Illustrated by Barbara Cooney)
• The Cow Who Fell in the Canal (1950) (Illustrated by Peter Spier)
• The Very Little Girl (1953)
• Scaredy Cat (1959)
• Benny’s Flag (1960)
• The Very Little Boy (1962)
• Susan Sometimes (1962)
• The Girl Who Was a Cowboy (1965)
• The Very Tall Little Girl (1969)
• The Shy Little Girl (1970) (Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman)
• The Popular Girls Club (1973) (Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman)
• L C is the Greatest (1975)
• The Man Who Entered a Contest (1980)
• The Man Who Cooked for Himself (1981)
• The First Tulips in Holland (1982)
• The Man Who Tried to Save Time (1983)
• The Happy Times Storybook (1989)
• The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fix Things (1992)
• The Woman Who Saved Things (1993)
• The Christmas Tree That Grew (1997)

Death

Krasilovsky died at the age of 87 on February 27, 2014, in Redding, Connecticut, of complications from a stroke.