The Moved-Outers

FLORENCE CRANWELL MEANS

Publication: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1945, Boston

First edition. 8vo. [6], 154 pp. Title in black on tan, color frontispiece., color plates illustrated by Helen Blair. Orange-colored publisher’s cloth, black lettering front cover & spine, color-illustrated endpapers. A.Newberry Honor Award book. First edition of this uncommon historical novel detailing the life of a young teenage Sansei Japanese-American girl forcibly and illegally removed from their home to the Santa Anita Assembly Center, and later the Amache, Colorado concentration Internment Camp. This 1946 Newbery Honor book was largely based upon questionnaires the author had distributed to Nisei Japanese-Americans in and around Denver, CO during World War II offering details of their internment by the U.S. Government, and their daily lives in the Internment Camps, now held with her papers at the Univ. of Colorado. Means (1891-1990) had shaped her career by investigating and presenting oppressed racial/religious minorities in the United States, including Tangled Waters (1936) about a Navajo girl, Shuttered Windows (1938) about an African-American teenager in South Carolina sea islands, Heroine of Teesita of the Valley (1943) story of a Mexican-American girl living in Denver, as well as other similar type publications. The Moved Outers was largely shunned by public & private schools and school librarians, as well as public libraries after winning awards, and receiving very favorable press. The book is a fine, bright, clean copy in dust jacket with light wear to the spine ends and corners, a few small holes to the spine panel and flap folds and light wear to the extremities. An important book that is scarce today and describes the impact President F. D. Roosevelt's decision had on Japanese/American families living in the United States, to be uprooted and moved to internment camps at the outset of the war with Japan in 1941, during World War II.

Inventory Number: 51728