Mary Ann Hoberman, an award-winning poet who wrote dozens of books for children, capturing the essence of childhood in her seemingly effortless rhymes, died July 7 at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 92.
Her family confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.
Mrs. Hoberman was the author of more than 50 books for young readers, the first published in 1957, when she was the young mother of her own little children, and the last still forthcoming. In 2008, when the Poetry Foundation awarded her a two-year appointment as young people’s poet laureate, a writer for the foundation described her as “a consummate channeler of children’s sensibilities.”
She received a National Book Award for “A House Is a House for Me” — first printed in 1978, an enduring classic — and had bestsellers in her more recent “You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You” series, in which color-coded text guides a child and grown-up along in reading each volume as a book “in two voices.”
In those volumes, as in so many others, Mrs. Hoberman used rhyme, rhythm and wordplay to make reading a joyous experience. “I don’t like it when a four-line poem of mine is in a teacher’s manual, and there are three pages on how to use it across the curriculum and it’s analyzed to death,” she once told the Chicago Tribune.
Of course, neither do children, and Mrs. Hoberman had what she described as total recall of her life when she was one of them. Those recollections — of silliness, frustration, fear and triumph in the face of growing up — became the reservoir upon which she drew during decades of writing. She wrote in one poem:
When I grow up, I want to be
A grown-up who remembers me
And what it felt like to be small:
How much I liked to bounce a ball
And pump my swing high in the air
And think of flying everywhere.
How scared I was of doors that creak
Or being it in hide-and-seek
Or if my parents had a fight
Or when I had bad dreams at night.
In “A House Is a House for Me,” illustrated by Betty Fraser, Mrs. Hoberman wrote of how “a hill is a house for an ant,” “a hive is a house for a bee” and “a house is a house for me!”
Later pages include the whimsical yet indisputable observations that “a glove is a house for a hand,” “a stocking’s a house for a knee,” “a shoe or a boot is a house for a foot” and — of course — “a house is a house for me!”
By the end, the book turns downright philosophical, musing that “A book is a house for a story. / A rose is a house for a smell. / My head is a house for a secret, / A secret I never will tell.”
A reviewer for School Library Journal, edging up to literary criticism, noted that the book employed “alternating lines of anapestic trimeter and tetrameter with lots of end and internal rhyme.” But more to the point, it employed imagination.
“I can’t help but admire the frenzied intelligence and care of it all, and recommend it for parents and children patient enough to slow down and take it in bit by bit,” a reviewer, Harold C.K. Rice, wrote in the New York Times. “It’s an astonishing picture book, one of the best of the year.”
Other popular volumes by Mrs. Hoberman included “The Seven Silly Eaters” (1997), illustrated by Marla Frazee, about a family of picky eaters, and “Whose Garden Is It?” (2004), illustrated by Jane Dyer, examining who among the denizens of a garden — the gardener, a woodchuck, a bee and so on — is most to thank for its glories.
Mrs. Hoberman collected 100 of her favorite poems in “The Llama Who Had No Pajama” (1998), illustrated by Fraser. Her poems might have seemed simple, but the simplicity was a trick of the eye and ear.
“Children’s poetry requires precision tools, a childlike ear, a capacity for spirited irreverence, and a scrupulous lack of pretension,” the writer Michael Atkinson observed in an admiring essay about Mrs. Hoberman’s work and published on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
“What’s more,” he continued, “its intended readers have only their inner metronomes and innate sense of the absurd to inform how they react to a poem, not a wealth of experience or literary-cultural know-how, and their native antennae cannot be easily bamboozled.”
Mrs. Hoberman ventured into prose only for her novel “Strawberry Hill” (2009), a semi-autobiographical historical novel about a 10-year-old girl growing up during the Depression.
Mary Ann Freedman was born in Stamford, Conn., on Aug. 12, 1930. In the early years of her life, her family moved frequently as her father sought work in sales and later real estate. He eventually founded a Jewish country club.
Her mother, a homemaker, raised Mrs. Hoberman and her younger brother, whom she kiddingly described in a widely anthologized poem about a “little bother / of a brother.”
Mrs. Hoberman loved fairy tales and professed that she knew she would be a writer before she could set pen to paper. She later remembered her profound melancholy when she realized that one is obliged to grow up. She did not want to “forget how to play,” a fate she said she had seen befall too many adults.
During her undergraduate years at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., Mrs. Hoberman studied in Paris, sailing across the Atlantic with Jacqueline Bouvier — later first lady Jacqueline Kennedy — who was then a student at Vassar College and embarking on her own year abroad.
Mrs. Hoberman married her husband, Norman Hoberman, in 1951 and received a history degree from Smith later that year. She received a master’s degree in English and literature from Yale University in 1985.
When she became a mother, Mrs. Hoberman amused her children with poems and rhymes. On a whim, she prepared a manuscript, “All My Shoes Come in Twos,” asked her husband to illustrate it and sent the package to a publisher. It was accepted, the start of her career as a published author. Her husband illustrated her next three volumes as well.
Mrs. Hoberman’s most recent book, “Away With Words!” (2022), was illustrated by her son Perry Hoberman. Her poetry collection “How Elegant the Elephant,” illustrated by Frazee, is slated for publication next year.
Mrs. Hoberman’s husband died in 2015. Survivors include four children, Diane Louie of Paris, Perry Hoberman of Twentynine Palms, Calif., Chuck Hoberman of Brooklyn and Meg Hoberman of Kingston, N.Y.; a brother; and six grandchildren.
“If my books awaken some children to a love of language, to a sense of the magical qualities in individual words and their combinations, to a feeling that they, too, can make up poems and stories, I am grateful,” Mrs. Hoberman once said. “But even more, I want my books to bring joy and delight to their young readers and listeners — simple joy and delight.”
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly credited the photograph of Mrs. Hoberman to Randi Rosenblum. The photograph was taken by Lois Dreyer. The article has been updated.
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