Field was a descendant of David Dudley Field, the early New Englandclergyman and writer. She grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her first published work was an essay entitled "A Winter Walk" printed in St. Nicholas Magazine when she was 16. She was educated at Radcliffe College where she studied writing under George Pierce Baker. According to Ruth Hill Viguers, Field was "fifteen when she first visited Maine and fell under the spell of its 'island-scattered coast'. Calico Bush still stands out as a near-perfect re-creation of people and place in a story of courage, understated and beautiful." Field married Arthur S. Pederson in 1935, with whom she collaborated in 1937 on To See Ourselves. In 1938 one of her plays was adapted for the British filmThe Londonderry Air. She was also successful as an author of adult fiction, writing the bestsellers Time Out of Mind, All This and Heaven Too, and And Now Tomorrow. They were adapted as films produced under their own titles in 1947, 1940, and 1944 respectively. Field also wrote the English lyrics for that version of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" used in the Disney filmFantasia. Field is famous, too, for her poem-turned-song "Something Told the Wild Geese". She also wrote a story about the nativity of Jesus, "All Through the Night". She moved to Hollywood, where she lived with her husband and daughter. Rachel Field died at the Good Samaritan Hospital on March 15, 1942, of pneumonia following an operation.
Awards
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years received the Newbery Award in 1930, for the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." The 1944 Prayer for a Child, with a story by Field and illustrations by Elizabeth Orton Jones, won the Caldecott Medal recognizing the year's "most distinguished picture book for children" published in the U.S. Hitty and Prayer for a Child were both named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list of books deemed to belong "on the same bookshelf" with Carroll's Alice. Prayer for a Child was one of the seventeen inaugural selections in 1958, which were originally published 1893 to 1957. Hitty was added in 1961. Time Out of Mind won one of the inaugural National Book Awards as the Most Distinguished Novel of 1935, voted by the American Booksellers Association.
