E. C. Spykman

Who was E. C. Spykman?

Elizabeth Choate Spykman was an American author known primarily for her children's books.

Choate married geostrategist and founder of the Department of International Studies at Yale University Nicholas J. Spykman in her mid-thirties, and had two daughters. In 1955, at the age of 59, she published her first children's book, A Lemon and a Star. Her second, The Wild Angel, was published in 1957. Terrible, Horrible Edie was published in 1960, and her final children's book, Edie on the Warpath, was published posthumously in 1966.

These four books are about the Cares children growing up in Summerton, Massachusetts in the 1910s. They are widely believed to be autobiographical fiction. Virginia Haviland, writing in The Horn Book, said of A Lemon and a Star, "A remarkable evocation of turn-of-the-century growing-up in a story with a strong feeling of particular family reminiscence and at the same time of universal childhood . . . Unusually well written."

Spykman also wrote a history of the Westover School in 1959. In this, she wrote of the Westover School architecture, "the building was intentionally kept free from luxury as unsuited to school life and out of harmony with the atmosphere of the village, and the quiet refinement which goes with straightforward simplicity."