Karen Rose and Eleanor Cameron

When I decided to take it upon myself to become Eleanor Cameron’s official biographer, I didn’t realize that it would be a gift that keeps on giving. Eleanor touched so many lives through her personality and work that I’m always coming across new connections. Since I started researching her life and work in 2013, rarely does a month go by without some form of contact from an Eleanor fan.

Often they’re Mushroom Planet fans recalling the great joy the books brought them as children. Sometimes they’re production companies wondering about licensing, which I dutifully pass on to the appropriate parties. Every once in a while I hear from someone who was touched personally by Eleanor’s work and her generosity, like Ed Scheffler, who wrote her a letter and ended up being invited over for tea and cookies.

In the fall of 2023 I got an email from Lauri Rose. Her aunt, teacher and author Karen Rose, had become acquainted with Eleanor sometime in the late 1960s. When Karen died in 2012, Lauri inherited a slim file consisting of correspondence Karen received from Eleanor. She generously sent me this file. I repaid her with a copy of Eleanor Cameron: Dimensions of Amazement, and promised to send the letters on to the Kerlan Collection to join the rest of Eleanor’s papers after I’d read them over.

A few things were apparent right away. One was that Eleanor and Karen had a friendship that was intense but brief. The other was that I wanted to know more about Karen and her career. So I began researching Karen’s life and published bibliography. What I found was the story of an intelligent, gifted woman who persevered through depression through her entire adult life, and who excelled at writing about people who rise to the challenge of looking beyond their own experience.

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Karen Rose was born in Brooklyn on February 15, 1936. Her family, which included her mother (Rae), father (Leon), and brother Charles, were mostly secular Jews. Karen wrote her first stories in fifth grade. Her first subjects were dogs, but she soon moved on to people and poetry. As a child she was sexually exploited by a close relative, and this would become the root of many of her struggles with relationships and mental health in later life. At the age of 18 she got married, and the couple moved to Turkey for work. They quickly realized the marriage was a mistake, and Karen returned to the U.S. She settled in Los Angeles, where her Aunt Florence lived. Florence was an activist for reproductive rights, civil rights, and a humanitarian, and had played a large part in supporting and raising Karen.  

Even with her Aunt's support, Karen's struggled following her divorce and attempted suicide for the first time. As part of her recovery, she was diagnosed with depression and received her first electroconvulsive therapy procedure. 

Brooklyn Girl received a mixed reception. Charlotte S. Huck wrote that, “the author has created a very believable girl and gives authentic pictures of school, home, and neighborhood.” But the notoriously backhanded Kirkus Reviews, called it a “pallid affair” in comparison to Emily Neville’s It’s Like This, Cat, which had been released earlier that same year. The book didn’t become a bestseller.

When Karen met Eleanor, the former had just published her second book, There Is A Season, while the latter had been firmly established in the world of children’s literature for over a decade. Eleanor had just published the final book of the Mushroom Planet series (Time and Mr. Bass, 1967), and was working on her collection of critical essays, The Green and Burning Tree. Despite being at very different places in their careers, the pair found immediate common ground in both being Los Angelenos, as well as their mutual love of nature, cats, and being “word girls.”

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Eleanor and Karen didn’t share a city in common for long. In late 1968, Eleanor moved to Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula. The next year, Karen followed There Is a Season with a book taken from her experiences at Kenter Canyon. A Single Trail follows two fifth grade boys, one white and one black, as they take different paths to a common goal: learning to read. Naturally, the depiction of elementary school is extremely accurate and grounded, especially the way black boys are often held to a different standard even by well-meaning teachers. Charlotte Matthews Keating labeled it as “outstanding realistic fiction for boys.” The book includes a small tribute to Eleanor and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. One of the books Ricky and Earl read with their teacher is a story “about two boys going off in their own rocket ship to a planet in the sky.”

• Karen has recommended a book that Eleanor refers to only as "Steps." This is likely to refer to either Jerzy Kozinski’s Steps (1968) or Jakov Lind’s autobiography Counting My Steps (1969).

• Eleanor goes on a brief tirade against the then-current trend of “Oh God, isn’t life ghastly” books for young people and then recommends Vera and Bill Cleaver’s Where the Lilies Bloom and William Armstrong’s Sounder (both published in 1969) as better alternatives.

• Eleanor makes mention that Karen is working on a book with a the intriguing working title of Memoirs of a Near Teen-age Suicide. This was never published.

• Eleanor: “What the great literature has is not only agony and brutality, but humor growing out of the absurdity and delights of human relationships, and the moments of goodness and tenderness as well. I think you managed that very well in Season.”

Letter #2: May 21, 1970

Eleanor excitedly reports that she saw There Is a Season mentioned in Bookbird, a quarterly magazine put out by the International Institute for Children’s Literature in Vienna. They included Season as one of their “recommended for translation” books, along with several other higher profile works such as Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Bronze Bow, and Tom’s Midnight Garden (the latter being one of Eleanor’s favorite books).

Letter #3: April 21, 1971

The yearlong gap in correspondence may be explained by Eleanor’s work on A Room Made of Windows, but she makes allusions to Karen taking time away from work to deal with illness: “Of course the thing is to get your health back permanently and deeply and really.” Eleanor mentions St. Helena Hospital, which she calls the “Seventh Day Adventist Sanitarium,” as a possible place for Karen to stay. Eleanor mentions friends who have gone there to “find real health.” Lauri Rose reveals that this is all likely a reference to a prolonged depressive episode that Karen went through at this time.

Letter #4: September 29, 1971

In this brief letter Eleanor reveals her generosity and compassion, telling Karen to phone anytime and reverse the charges, and to let Eleanor know if there’s anything she and Ian can do, including giving her money.

My guess is that the handmade book was included with this letter as gift from Eleanor to Karen. Eleanor clearly drew on her unfinished art training, using a mix of collage, ink drawings, and calligraphy. The book poses a rhetorical question - “Why Are We Friends?” - and then proceeds to answer. Eleanor mentions their love of “the look of natural shapes” (accompanied by drawings of a shell, leaf, and grasshopper) and “the same places” (the redwood forests of Big Sur, the Monterey Peninsula). “We both know what it’s like to be rejected…but then accepted!” she adds, referring to their respective paths to becoming authors. The book also includes a picture of Eric Barker, and an untitled poem by Eleanor.

Letter #5: November 6, 1971

Here we learn that Karen is back living on her own again, a development that makes Eleanor very happy. 

Eleanor writes of a writing class that Karen may teach at UCLA, and in one paragraph recommends fourteen different books that she thinks Karen should read!

Eleanor has added a handwritten note at the top of this letter in which she says she is nearly finished with her next book, a fantasy. “Nobody will like it as well as Room.” That book was The Court of the Stone Children (1973), and it would go on to win the National Book Award and become one of Eleanor’s most well-loved books.

Letter #6: December 4, 1971

Eleanor mentions yet another unrealized project of Karen’s: a picture book. Eleanor thinks it’s very good though “for older children than the picture book age” and recommends a couple of editors Karen might send it to. One of these was Ann Durrell, who would soon become Eleanor’s editor when she jumped over to Dutton.

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And that’s it. It’s hard to say whether there were more letters that Karen simply didn’t keep, if there was some sort of falling out between them, or if they simply drifted apart the way some friends do. I will say that in my reading of Eleanor’s papers at the Kerlan Collection, I didn’t come across any letters from Karen (or to her; Eleanor kept carbons of most of her sent letters). More accurately, there may have been those types of letters, but at the time I didn’t judge them significant enough to take note of.

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Karen’s writing career took some unexpected twists and turns from this point forward. In 1975 her essay “A Place to Rest One’s Faith” appeared in The Integration of American Schools: Problems, Experiences, Solutions. Here she adds real life context to A Single Trail, detailing the efforts to integrate Black students from Hooper Avenue Elementary School, located in the central part of L.A., into the white, middle class Kenter Canyon. Her advice for how to reach a challenged student is as true today as it was nearly 50 years ago: “change his self-image, care for him, go where he is and begin from there, convince him that if he can’t read, obviously it is your fault.” Lauri reports that - having received feedback on her own writing - that her Aunt Karen was  “gifted  at delivering devastatingly honest criticism with finesse and kindness.”

1975 also saw the publication of Karen’s fourth book, a nonfiction exploration of unexplained phenomena. In the Land of the Mind features profiles of prominent gurus, healers, theorists and scientists who specialize in the paranormal. Though Karen was, by her own admission in the dust jacket, more inclined to believe than not, she took a methodical approach to her research. She even took her then 14-year-old nephew David along on her research outings to meditation groups, Hari Krishna meetings,  Uri Geller psychic shows, and the like. While Karen’s scientific approach and serious tone may have helped legitimize the ideas, it robbed the book itself of much of the primal thrill that most readers would be looking for in a book about the unexplained and unexplainable.

Karen’s next book was not short on primal thrills or popular appeal, but it was the result of great suffering. That First Bite: Journal of a Compulsive Overeater (1979) is a gripping account of Karen’s battle with binge eating. 

Karen’s sixth and final book was a return to young adult fiction. Kristin and Boone (Houghton Mifflin 1983) is the story of a complex relationship that forms between a teen actress whose career is on the ascent and a critically lauded director who happens to be a dwarf. Karen co-wrote the book with Lynda Halfyard, who wrote romance novels under a pseudonym. Karen and Lynda likely met in Overeaters Anonymous, and may have had a romantic relationship (Karen was bisexual; most of her relationships were with men but she sometimes had forays with women)  The idea for Kristin and Boone arose when Karen and Lynda discovered a shared love of the actor Michael Dunn, a dwarf who received an Academy Award nomination for his first major film role (Ship of Fools, 1965) and then went on to several memorable TV roles (most notably as Dr. Loveless on The Wild Wild West). The writers hoped to sell the movie rights to their book, but it wasn’t to be.

By this point Karen had retired from teaching, a circumstance that was forced by the disabling effects of her depression. These years would be defined by her battles for mental health. She attempted suicide at least three more times; these instances were mostly cries for help rather than serious efforts to end her life, but they underscore the  black humor in these lines from That First Bite: “The criminally insane get away with it. What do the suicidally insane get?”

She received several more ECT courses, which had a devastating effect on her memory, though it did lead to a publishing triumph. In 1993 she placed a poem in the New Yorker, an “over the transom” piece titled: “Memory During Antidepressant Treatment.” But this was a rare bright spot. 

After her family members moved away from the Los Angeles area and most of her friends abandoned her, Karen relied heavily on one devoted person, a friend named Sue. With her only income coming from disability, she lived in poverty in a one-bedroom. rent-controlled apartment with a succession of cats, including Hepburn (after Katherine) and P.D. (after the author P.D. James). She was involved in a hit and run accident that permanently damaged her hip and made it difficult for her to walk. She tried to write but the mental effort was too much, and often she couldn’t even bring herself to get out of bed. Lauri says, “She was hospitalized multiple times, had some gifted psychiatrists and tried every med there is. They all failed her sooner rather than later.”

Despite this, Karen always held on to the belief that she’d one day find a way to live the life she desired - “a loving, lovable, laughing successful writer,” as Lauri puts it. This optimism is reflected in her poem “The Crappies,” which imagines life as a movie. The final verse goes: 

“Last and most important - 

It is going to come out all right 

If it takes twenty more years 

To find out all the reasons 

Everything happened as it did. 

The audience is not to worry. 

No one of us will have loved in vain.”