Edith Kunhardt Davis, author (mostly of children’s books). I hadn’t heard of her before the NYT published her obit, but this is a kind of sad story that’s worth noting here.
Her mother was Dorothy Kunhardt, who also wrote children’s books, most famously Pat the Bunny.
Some of her books were Pat spinoffs, but she wrote originals too.
Dorothy Kunhardt revered Abraham Lincoln, a passion she inherited from her father, Frederick Hill Meserve. Their house in Morristown was filled with Lincoln and Civil War memorabilia. Over the decades, Philip Kunhardt amassed one of America’s greatest private Lincoln collections, with about 73,000 items, including a snippet of Lincoln’s hair.
Five generations of the family have been absorbed by Lincoln, and many of its members, including Dorothy Kunhardt, wrote books about him. On a trip to Springfield, Ill., she bought lamps from the parlor where Lincoln was married and used them to light her own house. Little wonder that Edith eventually wrote her own account, a children’s book titled “Honest Abe” (1993).
The sad part is that Ms. Davis was an alcoholic until 1973, when she got sober and began writing in earnest. She had a son, Edward, while she was drinking:
And long after she had become sober, she was confronted with the possibility that her excessive drinking while she was pregnant had led to the death of her son when he was 27.
His death, from heart disease, in 1990 became the subject of Ms. Davis’s 1995 memoir, “I’ll Love You Forever, Anyway.” An account of her grief made all the more anguishing by her guilt, it stood in stark contrast to the cheerful children’s tales for which she was known.
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