Author. She is remembered for her children's literature, with just under thirty books and with numerous short stories to her credit. Born Charlie May Hogue, her father was a tenant farmer as well as a teacher and an author who wrote "Back Yonder, An Ozark Chronicle" (1932). When she was three years old, her family moved to Memphis, Tennessee and was educated in the public schools there. After graduating from high school, she attended Memphis Normal School (now Memphis State University). While in college, her first attempt at publishing a novel was rejected and she then focused on art studies. She married Walter Lowenstein, a wealthy Memphis mercantile heir who died shortly afterward. She then moved to Chicago, Illinois, and later to Paris, France, to further her art studies. In 1926 while in Paris, she met and married Howard Simon, an artist who would become the illustrator of her books. In the early 1930s they moved to Perry County, Arkansas where they built a remote log cabin in the woods and she began writing her children's books. Her first published work was "Robin on the Mountain" (1934) and is considered by many as a classic in the field of children's literature. She soon divorced her husband, as he was not adaptable to country living, and he returned to Paris. She then met Arkansas Pulitzer Prize winner poet John Gould Fletcher and they were married in January 1936 and moved to their new home "Johnswood" on the bluffs of the Arkansas River outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. After her husband's death in 1950, she spent three years in Japan, teaching English at the Women's University in Tokyo. She also traveled to Africa where she met Albert Schweitzer and published "All Men Are Brothers: A Portrait of Albert Schweitzer" (1956). In 1958 she received the Albert Schweitzer Book Prize for "A Seed Shall Serve," her biography of Toyohiko Kagawa, a prominent spiritual leader in Japan. Her other notable books include "The Sharecropper" (1937), "Art in the New Land" (1945), and "Razorbacks Are Really Hogs!" (1972). She died at the age of 79. In 1971 the Arkansas Department of Education named their annual Children's Literature Award the Charlie May Simon Award in her honor. In 1981 two volumes of her short stories, "Christmas Every Friday and Other Christmas Stories" and "The Arkansas Stories of Charlie May Simon" were published posthumously.