Send an ecard of this image

Read Misty for Me!

Marguerite Henry, celebrated children's book author, was born one hundred years ago today in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Henry wrote 59 books for young people, including the classic Misty of Chincoteague—a story about a wild horse. Before she died in 1997, she created the Misty of Chincoteague Foundation to help protect the wild ponies of Chincoteague Island.

Horse in Water by Mary Frank evokes Henry's idyllic world of the first island ponies that had escaped a Spanish shipwreck.

"The seasons came and went, and the ponies adopted the New World as their own. They learned how to take care of themselves. When summer came and with it the greenhead flies by day and the mosquitoes by night, they plunged into the sea, up to their necks in the cool surf. The sea was their friend. Once it had set them free. Now it protected them from their fiercest enemies."

Source: Marguerite Henry. Misty of Chincoteague (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

Pictured: Mary Frank, born England 1933, Horse in Water, from the portfolio The New Provincetown Print Project, 1990, 1990, monoprint with collagraph and chine colle on paper, 22 1/4 x 30 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Burton and Brunetta Wolfman through the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.