In addition, North wrote Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House, The Wolfling: A Documentary Novel of the Eighteen-Seventies, Racoons are the Brightest People, Hurry Spring, and many other books. (The movie garnered an Academy Award nomination for best song: 'Lavender Blue', sung by Burl Ives). North's book Midnight and Jeremiah was made into the Disney movie So Dear to My Heart in 1949. A 1934 North novel, Plowing on Sunday, featured a rare dust jacket illustration by Iowa artist Grant Wood. One of his first books, The Pedro Gorino, published in 1929, was a narrative of the life of Harry Dean, an African-American sea captain. This writing effort was at the same time as the setting of Rascal and may have been an early literary inspiration to North.Īfter attending the University of Chicago, Nort worked for the New York World-Telegram and the New York Sun before becoming (he left without graduating in 1929), North worked as a reporter (eventually literary editor) for the Chicago Daily News, the New York World-Telegram and the New York Sun before becoming a full-time freelance writer. One of these uncles was Justus Henry Nelson, an early missionary in the Amazon Basin. When Sterling North was eleven (in 1917, which would have been the year of his maternal grandfather's 100th birthday), several of his uncles wrote extended biographies about their parents and their pioneer farm life. Sterling North had three siblings: two sisters, Jessica Nelson North who was an author, poet, and editor Theo, who was the martinet in the family and a brother, Herschel, who survived World War I.

She married David Willard North, also the product of a pioneering local family, whose brother ran the family farm.

His daughter, Sarah Elizabeth 'Elizabeth' Nelson, was Sterling North's mother she died when Sterling was seven years old. Born in Putnam County, New York, James moved first to near Rochester, New York, then to Menomonee, in Waukesha County, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee), then pioneered a farm near present day South Wayne, in southwestern Wisconsin. Sterling North's maternal grandparents, James Hervey Nelson and Sarah Orelup Nelson, were Wisconsin pioneers. Surviving a near-paralyzing struggle with polio in his teens, he grew to young adulthood in the quiet southern Wisconsin village of Edgerton, which North transformed into the 'Brailsford Junction' setting of several of his books. North, who professionally went by 'Sterling North', was born on the second floor of a farmhouse on the shores of Lake Koshkonong, a few miles from Edgerton, Wisconsin in 1906 and died in Morristown, New Jersey in 1974. Thomas Sterling North (Novem– December 22, 1974) was an American author of books for children and adults, including 1963's bestselling Rascal.

Rascal north