Jane Yolen, a children’s author who wrote some 450 books in practically every conceivable genre, including history, how-to, science fiction and poetry, and whose immensely popular children’s books, rich in folklore and fantasy, earned her the nickname “America’s Hans Christian Andersen,” died on Thursday at her home in Hatfield, a town in western Massachusetts. She was 87.
Her family announced the death in a statement.
Ms. Yolen never encountered a genre she didn’t like; among her early books was a history of kites. Yet running through almost all her writing was a strong through-line of deep psychological insight and a sense of wonder. Many of her works were fables and folklore, whether retellings of old stories or her own, original tales.
“It is books with morals that one thinks of as most characteristic of the prolific Ms. Yolen,” the essayist Noel Perrin wrote in The New York Times in 1992, calling her “a modern equivalent to Aesop.”
Her best known books include “Owl Moon,” a poetic picture book illustrated by John Schoenherr that won the Caldecott Medal in 1988; “The Devil’s Arithmetic” (1988), about a Jewish girl who travels back in time to the Holocaust; and the “Pit Dragon Chronicles” series, fantasy novels which appeared between 1982 and 2009.
She was inspired by the Eastern European Jewish folk stories she heard as a child — her father was born in present-day Ukraine — and by the writers she fell in love with as a teenager, like Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.
She wrote every day, and could find inspiration in almost anything. “Dream Weaver and Other Tales” (1989) was inspired by Gary Wright’s 1975 song “Dream Weaver,” about a romantic interest — though the book centers on a storyteller instead.
The father and daughter at the center of “Owl Moon” are based on her own husband and daughter. She published her history of kites, “World on a String” (1968), when her father, a publicist, had a client who was a kite manufacturer.
Ms. Yolen said she liked writing poetry the most. When her husband, David Stemple, had cancer in the early 2000s, she wrote a sonnet on each day he received treatment. When the cancer went into remission, she published the poems as a book, “The Radiation Sonnets” (2003).
And after her husband died, in 2006, she published another book of poems, “Things to Say to a Dead Man” (2011).
Ms. Yolen rejected the idea, occasionally put forward by critics or interviewers, that she would do better to focus on a single form or genre. It was all storytelling, she believed, no matter how it was told.
“Stories don’t exist on the page or in the mouth,” she told The Boston Globe in 1987. “They exist between — between writer and reader, between teller and listener.”
Jane Hyatt Yolen was born on Feb. 11, 1939, in Manhattan into a family of writers. Her father, William, was a journalist and later a publicist; her mother, Isabelle (Berlin) Yolen, was a social worker who wrote short stories and constructed crossword puzzles on the side.
“When I was young, I thought all grown-ups were writers,” she told Science Fiction Chronicle magazine in 2002, “that after their day jobs (policeman, fireman, teacher, pediatrician, butcher) they went home and spent the evenings writing.”
Jane followed her parents’ lead early on. She said that her earliest memory was of a poem she wrote when she was 5. In second grade she wrote the school musical, both lyrics and score. It centered on a group of vegetables, and she cast herself as lead carrot.
While at Smith College, she spent summers working as an intern for New England newspapers, and wrote poetry and fiction on the side. She published her first book, “Pirates in Petticoats” (1961), a history of women swashbucklers, at 22.
She received her degree, in English and Russian literature, in 1960. She received a master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1978.
After college Ms. Yolen returned to New York, where she worked as an editorial assistant at newspapers and book publishers, including Knopf. She wrote for herself on evenings and weekends, until she was confident enough to become a full-time freelancer.
She married Mr. Stemple, a computer scientist, in 1962. They moved to Hatfield in 1966 when he got a teaching position at the University of Massachusetts.
Ms. Yolen is survived by their children, Heidi, Adam and Jason Stemple; five grandchildren; and her brother, Steven.
She collaborated with all three of her children: She co-wrote books with Heidi, a children’s author; Adam, a musician, composed scores to accompany some of her work; and Jason, a photographer, provided images for others.
In her interview with The Boston Globe in 1987, the reporter asked how she could write so much, so quickly.
“There are two kinds of writers, mule team drivers and horse and buggy drivers,” Ms. Yolen said. “The buggy driver writes one story and goes on to the next; the mule driver has many stories going at the same time. One way is not better than the other. It just happens I can work on several things simultaneously.”
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