Elliott's illustrations appearing in Harper's and Scribner's magazines were the most influential on the young Haywood, and she began to develop her interest in children's literature with new zeal. Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliot and Jessie Wilcox Smith, both students of Pyle like Oakley, also tutored Haywood early in her career. Even today a number of Haywood's murals dot various banks and schools around the Philadelphia area and southeastern Pennsylvania. Oakley, a student of the prominent children's book author Howard Pyle, influenced Haywood to try mural painting while Oakley completed work on the famous murals at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. Upon Haywood's return to Philadelphia, Violet Oakley, a premiere local artist, hired her as a studio assistant while completing her study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1925, Haywood won yet another scholarship, this time a Cresson traveling scholarship, and set forth for Europe spending a year traveling the continent.

Haywood's initial desire to study illustration was sidetracked at first by an early teacher, Henry McCarter, whose deeper interests in portrait painting rubbed off on Carolyn. She enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1923, after only teaching for one year, and received a substantial scholarship enabling her to devote herself solely to study.

It was while teaching at Friends Central that her true passion for children's literature emerged, initially because there were no identifiable books for the upper primary grades, especially the third grade students she daily taught. Haywood's talents immediately gained her employment at the Friends Central School in Wynnewood, a western suburb of Philadelphia. Haywood's parents encouraged her prevalent artistic talents from a young age as their daughter spent most of her free time drawing and painting.Īfter attending the Philadelphia High School for Girls, Haywood matriculated at the Philadelphia Normal School in 1922 with a background in teaching. Born on January 3, 1898, to parents of modest, middle-class means, Charles and Mary Emma (Cook) Haywood, Carolyn had one sibling, a younger brother who later became a silversmith, who passed away in 1958. Carolyn Haywood, the beloved children's book author, was a life-long Pennsylvanian and Philadelphian.

Betsy's Little Star by Carolyn Haywood