In Memoriam: Joan W. Blos, 1928-2017

Joan Blos, an educator and author, died last month in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was 89 years old.

Blos is best known for her book A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal, 1830-32 (Scribner, 1979). It won the National Book Award for Children’s Books in 1980. The book is written as a diary kept by a young girl in a rural town in the early nineteenth century.

Blos was a native of New York City. She was a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and earned a master’s degree in psychology at the City University of New York.

From 1958 to 1970, Blos taught at the Bank Street College of Education in New York. Later she served on the faculty at the University of Michigan. Many of her papers were donated to the special collection archives at the University of Michigan.