Clara Louise Burnham

Clara Louise Burnham built an American career as a novelist and children's writer whose New England settings drew on childhood memories and later summers in Maine. The daughter of composer George Frederick Root, she also wrote verse and texts connected with music before building a long career in fiction. Wenonah’s Stories For Children, published by Boston's Harmony Shop in 1918, was created with Warren Proctor and frames a sequence of tales told to Lois and Harold during a changed summer holiday. In Apple-Blossom Time followed from Houghton Mifflin in 1919 with illustrations by B. Morgan Dennis and the subtitle A Fairy-Tale to Date. Its cast is presented through fairy-tale roles while the action unfolds in a contemporary American setting. Burnham's wider bibliography includes Jewel, The Opened Shutters, and The Inner Flame. Together, these books show complementary parts of her practice: one addresses younger listeners through embedded storytelling, while the other reshapes romance and social comedy through an explicitly modern fairy-tale design.