Children’s author-illustrator Byron Barton, known for his many picture books for very young children featuring simple text and images rendered in bold blocks of color and thick black outline, died June 3 at his home in Lakewood Ranch, Fla., following a long illness; he was 92.
Apr 13, 2021
A Girl Named Al and
Beat the Turtle Drum, died on April 7 at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Conn. She was 96.
Greene was born on October 24, 1924 in Manhattan, the second daughter of Mabel and Richard Clarke, both journalists. Mabel Clarke was the first movie critic for the
New York Daily News, the same newspaper where Richard Clarke served as managing editor.
Greene grew up in Larchmont, and upon graduating from Marymount School in Manhattan, she enrolled at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1942. But after two years of study, Greene left college in 1944, noting in her
Something About the Author autobiography that “what I craved, what I needed, was a taste of the real world. A job.” She landed one in the mailroom at the Associated Press in New York. She worked her way up from there, soon earning a position as a reporter for the AP’s city desk during WWII, where favorite assignments included interviewing Frank Sinatra and Marlene Di