Elaine Lobl Konigsburg is an American writer and artist of books for kids and young adult fiction. She is the only writer to win the Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor in the same year, 1968, with her second and first works respectively: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William Mckinley, and Me, Elizabeth. Konigsburg won a second Newbery Medal in 1997 for The View from Saturday, 29 years later, the longest span between any two Newberys prized to one writer.
Born Elaine Lobl in New York, Konigsburg grew up in small towns in Pennsylvania, the second of three daughters. As a child, Konigsburg was an avid reader even though reading was not strongly encouraged by her family.
(E.L. Konigsburg photo #2)
She finished university in Farrell, Pennsylvania as valedictorian, and worked briefly as a bookkeeper in a wholesale meat plant to earn money for college. There she met the brother of one of the owners who would later become her husband, David Konigsburg. Konigsburg enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and earned a degree in chemistry, becoming the first person in her family to graduate from college.
(E.L. Konigsburg photo #3)
After graduating, she married David Konigsburg, a graduate student in psychology. She entered graduate colledge in chemistry at the High school of Pittsburgh, but after her husband attained his doctorate, they moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where Konigsburg worked as a science teacher at a colledge for girls.
E.L. Konigsburg
