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Results for Sandra Boynton
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"As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate."
| Sandra Boynton | |
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| Born | April 3 1953 Orange, New Jersey |
| Occupation | Cartoonist Humorist Author Songwriter |
| Website | http://www.sandraboynton.com |
Sandra Keith Boynton (born April 3, 1953) is a popular American humorist, songwriter, children's author and illustrator. Boynton has written and illustrated more than forty books for both children and adults, as well as over four thousand greeting cards, and four music albums. Although she does not license her characters to be redrawn or adapted, she has herself designed—for various companies—calendars, wallpaper, bedding, stationery, paper goods, clothing, jewelry, and plush toys.
Boynton’s greeting card designs for Recycled Paper Greetings were at the forefront of the Alternative Cards commercial movement that began in the mid-1970’s. According to RPG co-founder and President, Mike Keiser, over 200 million copies of Boynton's distinctive humorous cards—featuring an assortment of unnamed cartoon animal characters, spare layout, and droll messages—sold between the years 1973 and 1995. The best known of these is a 1975 birthday card bearing the message “Hippo Birdie Two Ewes.” The card has to date sold over ten million copies. As the greeting cards were signed simply “Boynton”, many consumers assumed the creator to be a man. Boynton reports having been often asked if she was related to “the guy who does the cards.” (To which she customarily responded, “Only marginally.”)
Since the 1977 release of Hippos Go Berserk, Boynton has published many children's books, as well as several illustrated humor books for the general market. Her books are most typically for very young children, offered in the laminated paperboard format known as board books. Nearly all of Boynton's books have been published by either Workman Publishing or Simon & Schuster. Four of her books have been New York Times Best Sellers: Chocolate: the Consuming Passion (1982); Yay, You (2001); Consider Love (2002); and Philadelphia Chickens (2002), which reached the number one position on the list, and was on the list for nearly a year. Three Boynton books are on the Publisher’s Weekly All-Time Bestselling Children's Books list. Nearly 20 million copies of her books have been sold.
In 1996, Boynton began writing and producing songs--which she has described as “renegade children’s music”--with composer
Michael Ford; these songs have been released as albums (Rhinoceros Tap, Philadelphia Chickens, and Dog
Train) and also published as book and audio disc sets. The tracks were recorded, under Boynton’s direction and Ford’s musical
direction, by an eclectic roster of actors and musicians, including Blues Traveler,
Meryl Streep, Alison Krauss, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, Kevin Kline, Laura Linney,
She has written the text for four choral pieces composed by Fenno Heath, Director Emeritus of the Yale Glee Club, all of which have been performed by the Yale Alumni Chorus on international tour.
In spring 2009, the Norman Rockwell Museum announced plans to present a retrospective of Boynton's work. The show will open in February 2009, and after three months at the Rockwell, will travel to art museums nationwide.
The third of the four daughters of Jeanne (née Ragsdale) and Robert W. Boynton, Sandra was
born in Orange, New Jersey, and grew up in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father was a noted progressive educator, scholar
(collaborating on text books with
Boynton’s parents converted to Quakerism when she was two years old. From Kindergarten through 12th Grade, she and her sisters attended Germantown Friends School, where their father taught English and was Head of the Upper School. Boynton has frequently cited as central to her own “upbeat offbeat” sensibility Germantown Friends’ arts-centered curriculum, as well as its thorough integration of the values of pacifism, independent inquiry, and individualism. She also spent part of her 10th grade year at Ackworth School near Pontefract, England.
She went on to Yale, entering in 1970 in the college's second year of coeducation. She spent the second semester of her junior year studying in Paris through Wesleyan University's program. At Yale, she majored in English, and also sang sporadically with the Yale Glee Club; she had joined the Glee Club when additional singers were needed for a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Boynton has described herself as "an enthusiastic but undistinguished alto." At her graduation from Yale in 1974, she received a Special Master’s Magna solemnly bestowed by Charles Davis, the Master of Boynton’s residential college, Calhoun College. Unbeknownst to the graduation audience, the honor was actually a fiction. Boynton’s grade point average did not in fact entitle her to any degree honor whatsoever; but shortly before the ceremony, she had told Professor Davis in mock earnest that “my parents are here, so I’d really appreciate it if you could just mumble some Latin after my name.”
She studied Latin for five years in high school—not so much out of a scholarly passion for Classics but rather as an avoidance of Science classes, the scheduling of which invariably conflicted with Latin. During her undergraduate and graduate years, her teachers included Cleanth Brooks, Harold Bloom, Richard B. Sewell, Maynard Mack, Maurice Sendak, Richard Gilman, Rocco Landesman, David Milch, Stanley Kauffmann, and William Arrowsmith. In an autobiographical talk given at Yale in 2002, "The Curious Misuse of a Yale Education", Boynton refers to her book Grunt (an illuminated book and recording of plainchant in Latin and Pig Latin) as "the culmination of a lifetime spent joyfully squandering an expensive education on producing works of no apparent significance."
Boynton intended to become a theater director. For graduate studies in drama, she attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year, then transferred to the Yale School of Drama D.F.A. program, but she did not complete the program. With the birth of her first child in 1979, Boynton postponed indefinitely a career in the theater, judging the demands of that profession not easily compatible with raising a family. She has been slowly returning to directing work: in May, 1995, she wrote and directed a benefit reading, On Stage—featuring Jill Clayburgh, Joe Pacheco, and Jane Curtin—for Sharon Stage in Connecticut; in November, 2005, she presented nine songs from Philadelphia Chickens and Dog Train at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage; and in November, 2006, she directed her son, Keith, in his own play, The Quotable Assassin, Off-Off-Broadway at Alternate Stages.
In 1978, Boynton married a fellow Yalie, the writer and olympic athlete Jamie McEwan, bronze medalist in the 1972 Olympic Games in the singles canoe class of Whitewater Canoe Slalom. McEwan was also in the 1992 Olympic Games, placing fourth in doubles canoe; in 1991, Boynton and McEwan moved with their children to the Hautes Pyrenees region of France for a year, so that McEwan and his doubles partner, Lecky Haller, could train with the French team. McEwan has been a member of several whitewater expeditions, to Mexico, Bhutan, British Columbia, and a National Geographic-sponsored descent of part of the Tsang-Po River (Brahmaputra) in Tibet, an ill-fated trip detailed in The Last River by Todd Balf, and in Courting the Diamond Sow by expedition leader, Wickliffe W. Walker. Boynton has illustrated two of McEwan’s five children’s books. They have four children: Caitlin McEwan, an actress; Keith Boynton, a playwright; Devin McEwan, a whitewater racer and member of the 2001 U.S. Team; and Darcy Boynton, a student. All four children are singers as well, and each performed on the Philadelphia Chickens recording.
Boynton received the Irma Simonton Black Award for Chloe and Maude, the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal for Barnyard Dance and for Your Personal Penguin, a Grammy Award Nomination for Philadelphia Chickens, the Eustace D. Theodore Fellowship (Yale University), and the National Cartoonist Society Greeting Card Award for 1992.
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
GENERAL MARKET BOOKS
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