“Courage is a constant theme in my writing,” says Levitin. This same organization gave her its Distinguished Body of Work Award that year, a recognition repeated in 1994.īut Levitin’s most distinguished works were yet to come.
Meanwhile, her humorous high school novel The Mark of Conte won the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People Best Fiction Award in 1981. She successfully attempted picture books, among them Who Owns the Moon, A Single Speckled Egg, A Sound to Remember, Nobody Stole the Pie, The Fisherman and the Bird, and All the Cats in the World. Fascinated by history, Levitin later wrote The No-Return Trail (1978) about the Bidwell Bartleson Expedition westward in 1848, winning the Western Writers of America award for the best juvenile western of 1978 and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. She followed her biographically inspired award-winning first novel with a light middle-grade work, Rita the Weekend Rat (1971), while her next published work was the painstakingly researched Roanoke: A Novel of the Lost Colony (1973), nominated for several important prizes. Levitin’s ability to diversify showed itself early in her career. But her acceptance as a writer of fiction came only after she turned what she had intended to be personal family memoirs for her children into Journey to America, a children’s classic still in print after thirty years. She was accepted into the Directed Writing Program at San Francisco College to work with Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of The Oxbow Incident, because Clark was impressed by the subjects Levitin chose, thoughtful and serious issues dealing with war, aging, love, sacrifice, and freedom.Īs Levitin began to write in earnest, she began with publicity articles, then became a newspaper columnist. She completed her degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 and the couple returned to the San Francisco Bay area, where Levitin worked as a teacher until the birth of son Daniel (b. In 1952, Levitin entered classes at the University of California at Berkeley where, early in her first semester, she met Lloyd Levitin, marrying him one year later. Silver Days (1989) and Annie’s Promise (1993), two additional books based on her family’s experiences and adjustment to America, would follow among her over thirty works published to date, bringing Levitin much critical praise, many devoted readers, and innumerable awards.Īs her parents struggled to make a living, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, Levitin grew into an avid reader and determined that she would someday be a writer. It won the Jewish Book Council National Book Award and was an American Library Association Notable Book. Years later, Levitin would write of her family’s traumatic uprooting in her first children’s novel, Journey to America, published in 1970. Separated again in Switzerland, they suffered many hardships before the penniless family was reunited in New York in 1939. In early 1938, three-year-old Levitin escaped from Berlin, her birthplace, to Switzerland with her mother, Helene (1897–1993) and her two older sisters, Vera and Eva, while her father, Max Wolff (1898–1968), a clothing designer and manufacturer, made his way to the United States. Whether Sonia Levitin is writing picture books, mysteries, humor, historical adventures, or Young Adult novels dealing with the struggle of young people to find freedom and meaning in their lives, she says “I’ve come to realize I am always writing my own life story, blending personal experience with research and, of course, imagination.I write for young people because I remember my own youth so well.”
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