Margaret Bloy Graham

Margaret Bloy Graham (2 November 1920 – 22 January 2015) was a Canadian creator of children's books, primarily an illustrator of picture books. She is best known for her work on Harry the Dirty Dog (1956) and other books in the Harry series written by her then husband Gene Zion.

Early life

Graham was born in Toronto. Her father, Malcolm Robert Graham, was a physician and her mother Florence (née Bloy) was a nurse. When Graham was one, the family moved to Sandwich, Ontario (now part of Windsor), where her father became the superintendent of the sanatorium. Her childhood was spent in Ontario, but she spent her summer holidays with either her grandfather in England or an aunt in the United States. The family returned to Toronto when she was ten. She attended Saturday morning classes at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Graham majored in art history at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1943. After graduation, she attended a summer course at the venerable Art Students League in New York City. She later supplemented her studies at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and also the New School for Social Research.

She decided to stay in New York to establish a career as a commercial artist. From 1944 to 1945 she worked as a ship draftsman for Gibbs & Cox and in 1946 she started work in the art department of Condé Nast Publications, where she remained until 1956.

Writer and illustrator

Graham met her first husband Gene Zion (1913-1975) at Condé Nast. They were married in July 1948.

Zion was urged by his new wife and also his editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper and Brothers, to write children's books. He remembers that it was Graham’s sketch of children gathering apples in an orchard, done several years earlier in Canada, that inspired his first book, All Falling Down (1951).

The husband-and-wife team became famous for the Harry series of books, beginning with Harry the Dirty Dog (1956) and followed by No Roses for Harry! (1958), Harry and the Lady Next Door (1960) and Harry By the Sea (1965). The collaboration ended with their divorce in 1968.

Graham received two Caldecott Honors, one for her work on All Falling Down, the second for her work on The Storm Book.

Graham launched her own writing career around the time of the divorce with Be Nice to Spiders (1967). She later developed her own canine hero, Benjy, through a series of books.

Later life

Graham remarried in 1972 to a merchant-ship officer, Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. She lived in retirement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died January 22, 2015. In 2022, she was inducted posthumously into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame.

Author and illustrator

Title	Year	Publisher
Be Nice To Spiders	1967	HarperCollins
Benjy and the Barking Bird	1971	HarperCollins
Benjy’s Dog House	1973	HarperCollins
Benjy’s Boat Trip	1977	HarperCollins
Benjy and His Friend Fifi	1988	HarperCollins

Illustrator

Title	Year	Author	Publisher
All Falling Down	1951	Zion G.	HarperCollins
The Storm Book	1952	Zolotow C.	HarperCollins
Hide and Seek Day	1954	Zion G.	HarperCollins
The Summer Snowman	1955	Zion G.	HarperCollins
Harry the Dirty Dog	1956	Zion G.	HarperCollins
Really Spring	1956	Zion G.	HarperCollins
Dear Garbage Man	1957	Zion G.	HarperCollins
Jeffie's Party	1957	Zion G.	HarperCollins
No Roses for Harry	1958	Zion G.	HarperCollins
The Plant Sitter	1959	Zion G.	HarperCollins
Harry and the Lady Next Door	1960	Zion G.	HarperCollins
The Meanest Squirrel I Ever Met	1963	Zion G.	Scribners
The Sugar Mouse Cake	1964	Young M.B.	Scribners
Harry by the sea	1965	Zion G.	HarperCollins
The Green Hornet Lunchbox	1970	Shirley Gordon	Houghton Mifflin
The Pack Rat’s Day and Other Poems	1974	Prelutsky J.	Macmillan
What if?	1987	Minarik E.H	Greenwillow
It’s spring!	1989	Minarik E.H	Greenwillow

Biographical sources

• Commire, A. (1977). GRAHAM, Margaret Bloy 1920- . In Something about the author (Vol. 11, pp. 119–120). Detroit MI: Gale Research
• Commire, A. (1980). ZION, (Eu)Gene 1913-1975. In Something about the author (Vol. 18, pp. 305–306). Detroit MI: Gale Research
• Graham, M.B. (1963). Margaret Bloy Graham 1920- . In M. Fuller (Ed.), More junior authors (pp. 102–103). New York: H.W. Wilson
• Kingman, L., Foster, J., & Lontoft, R.G. (Eds.). (1968). Graham, Margaret Bloy. In Illustrators of children’s books: 1957-1966 (p. 116). Boston: The Horn Book
• Literature Resource Center. (2002). Margaret Bloy Graham 1920- . In Contemporary authors online, from http://galenet.galegroup.com [University of Toronto Libraries]
• Pitchford, T.R. (2006). Graham, Margaret Bloy. In J. Zipes (Ed.), The Oxford encyclopedia of children’s literature [Electronic version]. Retrieved October 19, 2006, from http://www.oxford-childrensliterature.com [University of Toronto Libraries]
• Silvey, A. (Ed.). (2002). Graham, Margaret Bloy. In The essential guide to children’s books and the creators (p. 181). Boston: Houghton Mifflin
• Ward, M.E., & Marquardt, D.A. (1975). GRAHAM, Margaret Bloy, 1920- . In Illustrators of Books for Young People (2nd ed., p. 69). Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow

External links

• Margaret Bloy Graham at Library of Congress, with 25 library catalogue records
• Gene Zion Collection at CLRC, University of Minnesota – with biographical sketch