Barbara McClintock Papers

McClintock’s books have won 4 New York Times Best Books awards, a New York Times Notable Book citation, a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor award, and numerous other awards, recommended/best book lists, and starred reviews. Born in Clinton, New Jersey to a photographer and a seamstress/teacher and raised in North Dakota after the age of 9, McClintock drew constantly as a child. She says of herself, “I loved inventing stories - very scary stories - that I told to my best friend and her sisters in the darkest closet in their house. After numerous nights of my friends not being able to sleep due to the aforesaid scary stories, and the ensuing conversations between my friends' mother and my mother, I developed a more benign approach to storytelling.” She attended Jamestown College in North Dakota and studied for few months at the Art Students League after moving to New York. Essentially self-taught, McClintock continued to copy from art books checked out of libraries and sketched paintings and drawings in museums in New York, London, Paris, St. Her first job was designing characters for television commercials for an animation studio. She held various positions until meeting Jim Henson, when she began illustrating books for his television series Fraggle Rock. Her first book was based on a play written as a vehicle for the 19th Century French illustrator J.J. Grandville. She reports, “That play was the biggest epiphany of my life as an artist. I went home and immediately drew an 87 page sketchbook of the play from memory. Regrettably, the play closed within a week, robbing me of the opportunity to see it again. I made a wordless dummy book based on the story, THE HEARTACHES OF A FRENCH CAT, and took it around to publisher after publisher. Rejected by 16 publishers before it was accepted by David R. Godine, it won my first New York Times Best Books award.” McClintock resides in rural Connecticut with her partner, artist David Johnson.