Susan Cooper
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Susan Cooper has been writing for over 30 years. In this time she has written numerous newspaper articles, books for children and adults, screenplays for TV, the cinema and a Broadway play. As a writer she is hard to classify, what is universally accepted is that she is a writer with extraordinary gifts.
Born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England in May 1935, Susan Cooper attended Slough High School before going up to Oxford University. At Somerville College she read English. During her time at Oxford she was the first woman ever to edit the University magazine, Cherwell. After graduating with an MA in English, she began work as a reporter on the Atticus Column of Londons The Sunday Times (her first boss was Ian Fleming). She later became a feature writer.
Her first books were born during this period. Written after work and at weekends, her first was a so-called science fiction novel, Mandrake. And in response to a publishing house competition for a childrens adventure story, Over Sea, Under Stone.
In 1963 she left England to marry an American, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and went “rather nervously” to live in the USA. She wrote two more books for adults: a study of America, Behind the Golden Curtain and a biography of J.B. Priestley, Portrait of An Author.
A further novel, the autobiographical Dawn of Fear published in 1970, was written before continuing the Dark Is Rising series. Dawn of Fear is a solitary, looking at the experience of living in war-time Britain through the eyes of a child. The book is almost totally autobiographical except for the fact, as the author herself states, “I turned myself into a boy”.
It is, however The Dark Is Rising series which is synonymous with the name Susan Cooper. The first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, is perhaps more readily identified as a family adventure story than the other DR books – but it is much more than that. In Over Sea, Under Stone we have the first insights into the battle between the Dark and the Light and the introduction to the Arthurian and Celtic myths and legends which permeate the whole of the sequence. After completing Over Sea, Under Stone the reader has experienced only a taster of what is to come in the remaining stories. During the dozen or so years that followed publication of Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark Is Rising series was written, the remaining books in the series are: The Dark Is Rising published in 1973, Greenwitch published in 1974, The Grey King, published in 1975 and the final book in the sequence Silver on the Tree, published in 1977.
The Dark Is Rising series is a triumph. The series of books is moulded by Susan Coopers own background and each book effectively weaves a path between the stuff of myth and legend and the lives of everyday people – people like us. One of the books in the series, The Grey King, won the Newbery Medal in 1976. The prize is awarded yearly by the American Library Institute for outstanding contribution to Childrens Literature. It is perhaps a testament to the whole series that the award was made. The Grey King particularly looks at the human cost of the battle between the Dark and the Light. It is a powerful mix which explores the emotions of destiny, friendship love and loss. The DR books were completed in 1977.
After completion of the DR series, Susan Cooper began to work in the theatre, beginning by writing scripts for the annual Christmas Revels directed by John Langstaff. Several short plays, and her poem The Shortest Day, are still performed in Revels productions throughout the USA. Her first major play Foxfire was written in collaboration with the Canadian actor Hume Cronyn. It tells the story of the end of a way-of-life for an Appalachian family. The play was performed in Stratford, Ontario and at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis before transferring to New York, where it began a seven-month run at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1983. On Broadway, the play was a vehicle for the combined talents of husband-and-wife actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy; Tandy won a Tony award for her performance in the play.
During this time Susan Cooper began work on another book, Seaward, which saw a return to the fantasy elements of her earlier DR work. This period also saw Susan Cooper begin a new dimension to her writing career. Based upon her appreciation of Foxfire the actress Jane Fonda asked Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn to write a television screenplay from a book – Harriet Arnows The Dollmaker. The screenplay was written and