Ellen Tarry was an African-American journalist and author. Her work includes literature for children and young adults as well as an autobiography. Tarry's Janie Belle was the first African-American picture book.
Biography
Tarry was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Although raised in the Congregational Church, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. She attended Alabama State Normal School, now Alabama State University, and became a teacher in Birmingham. At the same time, she began writing a column for the local African-American newspaper entitled "Negroes of Note", focusing on racial injustice and racial pride. In 1929, she moved to New York City in hope of becoming a writer. There she befriended such Harlem Renaissance literary figures as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen. She was the first "Negro Scholarship" recipient at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, where she met and became friends with Margaret Wise Brown and was influenced by the "here and now" theory of picture book composition. Tarry published four picture books: Janie Belle, 1942's Hezekiah Horton, 1946's My Dog Rinty in collaboration with Caldecott Medal winner Marie Hall Ets, concerning a Harlem family and their mischievous pet, and 1950's The Runaway Elephant, which continued the relationships started in Hezekiah Horton. Tarry's The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman tells of her life in the South, her migration to New York City, her friendship with McKay, and her deep commitment to Catholicism. In 1942, Tarry was one of the first two co-directors along with Ann Harrigan Makletzoff, at the request of Catherine de Hueck Doherty, of the Chicago branch of Friendship House, a Catholic outreach movement promoting interracial friendship. Tarry's biographies include Katherine Drexel: Friend of the Neglected, Pierre Toussaint: Apostle of Old New York, The Other Toussaint: A Post-Revolutionary Black, and Martin de Porres, Saint of the New World. Tarry died on September 23, 2008, three days before her 102nd birthday. She had one daughter, Elizabeth Tarry Patton, from a brief marriage.
