Russell Freedman, Writer of History for Young Readers, Dies at 88

Russell Freedman, who brought readable, relatable history to young readers in dozens of well-researched, generously illustrated books, died on March 16 in New York. He was 88.

He had suffered a series of strokes, Holiday House, his publisher for some of those books, said in announcing his death.

Beginning in 1961, Freedman wrote more than 60 books, most of them about the people, movements and events that shaped the world, and especially the United States. There were biographies like “Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery” (1993) and “Becoming Ben Franklin” (2013). There were books about conflicts, like “The War to End All Wars” (2010), about World War I; and “Vietnam” (2016). There were books about young people who did impressive or courageous things, like “We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler” (2016).

Freedman related these stories in an engaging prose that was expertly pitched to pre-adult readers, avoiding condescension while finding angles and anecdotes that resonated with his audience.

“Opening the first page of his biography of Eleanor Roosevelt is to be transported into her child-life,” Lisa Von Drasek, curator of the children’s literature research collections at the University of Minnesota Libraries, said by email. “When I’ve read it aloud to fifth-graders, they vocally identified with her feelings of being unloved and isolated in the shadow of a family of extroverts.”

“And,” added Von Drasek, whose university archive is a repository of Freedman’s papers, “he was the original ‘crossover’ writer, publishing for children and young adults but perfect for an adult just entering into the subject matter.”

That was by design, Freedman indicated.

“If my grown-up friends cannot read one of my books with interest and respect,” he said in an interview when he won a National Humanities Medal in 2007, “then it’s not a good book for kids.”

Russell Bruce Freedman was born on Oct. 11, 1929, in San Francisco. His father, Louis, was West Coast manager for Macmillan publishing; his mother, the former Irene Gordon, was a homemaker.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 with an English degree and doing counterintelligence work in the Army during the Korean War, Freedman worked as a journalist and publicist. But then a chance bit of browsing changed his direction.

“One day I read an article about a 16-year-old blind boy who invented a Braille typewriter,” he recounted in a 1988 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “I thought that was remarkable. Then, as I kept reading, I learned that the Braille system itself, as used around the world, was invented by another 16-year-old blind boy, Louis Braille.”

He decided to write a book, “Teenagers Who Changed History.”

“By the time the book was completed, he realized it had to be a book for young readers,” said the critic and filmmaker Evans Chan, Freedman’s partner of many years, whom he married in 2013. The book was published in 1961, with a little help from Freedman’s father.

The many works that followed included a string of nature books like “Animal Architects” (1971). But a trip to a photographic exhibition changed his focus and approach.

“His interest in biographical and history writings was rekindled by a visit to a New-York Historical Society exhibition of ‘Street Kids: 1864-1977’ in 1978,” Chan said. “The show inspired Russ to begin combining text with vintage photos (and eventually archival illustrations) in his own books.”

He quickly put the approach to the test in “Immigrant Kids” (1980), using photographs and text to tell the stories of young immigrants in the early 1900s. A particularly effective example was “Lincoln: A Photobiography,” which won the Newberry Medal in 1988. It was one of only a handful of nonfiction books to win that prestigious children’s-literature award at that point, something Freedman attributed partly to poor writing practices.

“Condescension used to be the rule in children’s nonfiction,” he said at the time, “the belief that we needed to dramatize history to make it palatable and keep kids reading. So we lied. We created unbelievable characters — bland stereotypes — and fictionalized their lives. Biographies, almost without exception, were adulatory and reverential.”

In the Lincoln book, he said, he strove to convey the human qualities of Lincoln, including the shortcomings.

“When he started out, he was weak, indecisive, insecure, a crybaby,” he said. “Yet in my book, I can show the process of growth taking place. If kids see that our greatest president had the same fears, doubts and failings they have, they realize that Lincoln, whose picture hangs on every schoolhouse wall, was not all that different from them.”

Lincoln may be one of American history’s marquee names, but Freedman did not confine himself to obvious subjects.

“Russell’s writing was beautiful in its clarity and precision,” Mary Cash, his editor at Holiday House, said by email. “Yet his approach was usually broad. He included the perspectives of people whom others overlooked, such as Native Americans and enslaved people.”

Dinah Stevenson, his longtime editor at Clarion Books, recalled that someone once referred to Freedman as “the Zen master of children’s nonfiction.”

“The mastery is evident,” she said. “Perhaps the Zen was in the discipline and dedication that went into crafting his clear, compelling books. He made it look easy.”

One of the books she edited was “The War to End All Wars,” a work augmented by more than 100 photographs and illustrations. Chan said that the book so impressed the directors of the 2011 Broadway production of “War Horse,” a story set during World War I, that they assigned it as reading for the cast. Freedman adapted an essay from the book for the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s “War Horse” issue.

In addition to Chan, Freedman is survived by a sister, Carol Hutchinson.

One thing that teachers, librarians and inquisitive students love about Freedman’s books is that most are thoroughly annotated, so that the curious can follow his research path and delve deeper into the subject. In his book about one of the greatest American female athletes, “Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making of a Champion,” he included a cautionary tale for historians young and old.

“She tended to glamorize the story of her life, adding choice tidbits and details, putting a shine on past events,” he wrote. “As impressive as her achievements were, she could not resist the temptation to embellish them.”

In researching that book, he discovered that he had erroneously included her in his very first book, “Teenagers Who Changed History.” One of the things she stretched the truth about, it turned out, was her birth year.

“The first thing I was surprised to learn,” he wrote, “was that Babe wasn’t a teenager at all during the 1932 Olympics, as she claimed and the world believed.” Despite using, variously, a birth year of 1913, 1914, 1915 and 1919, she was born in 1911.