Morgan Sanders
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Morgan Sanders | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1934 Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. |
| Died | April 27, 2021 (aged 86–87) |
| Education | Reed College |
| Known for | Children's literature, painting, photography |
| Notable work | Alexander and the Magic Mouse (1969) |
Morgan Sanders (1934 – April 27, 2021), also known as Martha Sanders, was an American painter, photographer, poet, and author of the children's book Alexander and the Magic Mouse.
Sanders earned a B.A. in Literature at Reed College in 1955.[1] She wrote Alexander and the Magic Mouse (1969) under the nom-de-plume Martha Sanders.[2] It is a children’s book about an Alligator from China who lives with an Old Lady, a Brindle London Squatting Cat, a Magical Mouse, and a Yak.[3] Although Sanders was a working artist, the French illustrator Philippe Fix was responsible for the pictures. According to one reviewer in 1970, they "make the book the success it is."[3] The same reviewer likened the colors of Fix's illustrations to "yesteryear's tintypes," which "set the Victorian scene and show Alexander to best advantage."[3] Sanders created her own illustrations for Branwell Snit, a comic strip that appeared between 1975 and 1977 in Wisdoms Child, a pennysaver in New York City.[2] The comic strip similarly featured a cast of talking animal characters: Branwell F. Snit, a cogitating prodigy feline named after Branwell Brontë and based on Sanders's actual cat of the same name; Monroe, an undifferentiated bird; and Kenneth, a shaggy dog.[2] In 2016, Sanders published her entire Branwell Snit comic strip series in The Branwell Snitbook: The Complete Branwell Snit Cat Comix.[2][4]
Poetry
Throughout her adult life, Sanders wrote poetry, which eventually "approached the Wordsworthian ideal of natural and yet heightened language."[5] In 1975, one of her poems was included in an anthology of works by contemporary female poets.[6] Sanders published a collection of her poems and a selection of her drawings in Looking for Lola: Poems & Drawings by Morgan Sanders, which was released in 2018.[5] Most of the poems were written while she was living in New York City in the 1960s.[4]
