Lavender, William D. 1921-

views updated

LAVENDER, William D. 1921-

PERSONAL: Born 1921; son of Claud B. (a physician) and Maggie Mae (a homemaker; maiden name, Neel) Lavender; married Mary Bridget Kane (a research assistant); children: Debra, Larry, Randy. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Birmingham Southern Conservatory and College (Birmingham, AL), B. Music.; University of Southern California, M. Music.

ADDRESSES: Home and office—4210 Carney Ct., Riverside, CA 92507. Agent—Barbara Markowitz, Los Angeles, CA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Formerly employed by a U.S. government documentary film agency, scoring films and working on sound recording.

WRITINGS:

Flight of the Seabird (adult novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1977.

The Invisible People: A Musical Play, Anchorage Press (Louisville, KY), 2000.

Just Jane: A Daughter of England Caught in the Struggle of the American Revolution, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 2002.

Author of several novels for adults.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A historical novel set in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and composer William Lavender enjoyed several different careers—composing music, producing a musical show, and writing adult novels—before turning to writing fiction for children. After graduating from the Birmingham Conservatory, Lavender worked for several years composing music to accompany documentary films made by the U.S. government. He then began to create for a more general audience, writing the book, music, and lyrics for The Invisible People, a musical fantasy for children and family audiences that was successfully mounted throughout the United States. As Lavender told CA, "For years my wife and I made a sort of cottage industry out of promoting and handling the production arrangements of the play ourselves." Eventually Lavender offered The Invisible People for publication, and it appeared in print in 2000.

During the 1970s and 1980s Lavender wrote a handful of historical novels for adults, and one novel set in contemporary times. Although several of these novels were translated and brought out in foreign editions, by the turn of the millennium, all were out of print. Yet in the writing of them Lavender had honed his skills as a creator of historical fiction, a talent he was to put to good use in writing for children. "No longer feeling comfortable with the direction in which adult fiction was moving, I then discontinued writing for some time while engaging in other activities," he explained. "But recently I have returned to the novel form, now aiming my work at the Younger Reader genre." His 2002 offering, Just Jane: A Daughter of England Caught in the Struggle of the American Revolution, is Lavender's first novel for young readers, and as the title indicates, he returned to his favorite genre—historical fiction.

Lavender decided to base Just Jane, about an orphaned girl of noble English birth, in South Carolina, for as he continued, "Hardly any other American colony in rebellion against England saw the fabric of its everyday life so tragically torn apart as did South Carolina. The abundance of dramatic material collected was the basis of my decision to set my Revolutionary War story in that area." In the novel, Lady Jane Prentice, who drops her aristocratic title to become "just Jane," is forced to make choices about her own independence as well as her allegiance to the new nation or the old. Not only does the narrative involve Jane's decisionmaking over a six-year period, it involves family feuds, political wrangling, and finally military action.

Like many writers of historical fiction, Lavender sets high value on the accuracy of his portrayal of past life. "Since historical accuracy is of enormous importance in this kind of writing, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have an outstandingly capable research assistant in my wife, Mary," Lavender explained. "For this project, as for others, she has gone all out to compile prodigious amounts of historical information, both from published materials and original sources. In collecting the background material for Just Jane, we spent an entire month in South Carolina, ranging from Charleston to remote locations in the back country." This attention to authenticity paid off for Lavender, as reviewers noted it in their comments on the novel's dialogue, characterizations, and subplots. In School Library Journal, Renee Steinberg called Just Jane "beautifully written" and praised Lavender's "vivid factual information," "rich prose," and "multilayered characters." Because the action of the novel takes place over a longer period than that in many novels for the young teen reading level, Lavender had to sometimes recap the action for readers, a technique that slows down the action. Yet according to a Kirkus Reviews critic, "it's a lively story nevertheless," one that makes both the "personal and the political [choices] . . . real and immediate." Booklist contributor Carolyn Phelan predicted that historical fiction enthusiasts would find Just Jane "refreshing" for its unusual location.