Erickson, Phoebe

About the author

Phoebe Erickson wrote and illustrated children’s books. Many of them were about animals, and she also illustrated an adaptation of Black Beauty, adapted (and much shortened) by Eleanor Graham Vance for Random House in 1949.

Born in 1907 in North Bay, Wisconsin, Erickson grew up on a farm and was educated at the Chicago Art Institute and Columbia University. Her books reflected her rural upbringing, and her feeling that children should be educated gently. She felt children learned best when the message was not forced, and so the cruelty animals suffered was not necessarily spelled out bleakly; it was evident if the illustrations were studied.

The University of Minnesota, in its collection of her papers, has illustrations for books called Shire Colt and Shy Little Colt and Other Stories. I have not been able to find any evidence of these books being authored by Erickson, and neither have I been able to find books with these titles with Erickson’s illustrations. If you can provide any evidence of what these illustrations were for, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Finding the books
Black Penny can be pricey as a hardback but is cheap in paperback. Wildwing is easy to find, and generally not expensive. Neither was published in the UK. Black Beauty was published in the UK, and her version is reasonably easy to find, and not generally expensive.

Links and sources
National Library of Congress
Terri A. Wear: Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press, 1987
Phoebe Erickson’s papers are in the University of Minnesota
Thank you to Christina Wilsdon for the photograph of Black Beauty