Armstrong Sperry

Sperry worked between 1897 and 1976 across writer, painter, children's writer, screenwriter and illustrator. This article rests on 8 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Armstrong Sperry studied at Art Students League of New York. The recorded working language is English. Robert Louis Stevenson is recorded as an influence. Work by Armstrong Sperry is recorded in the collections of Harvard Film Archive. Distinctions recorded are Newbery Medal.

• Name — Armstrong Wells Sperry • Born — 7 November 1897 • Birthplace — New Haven, Connecticut • Died — 26 April 1976 • Place of death — Hanover, New Hampshire, US • Occupation — Writer, illustrator • Period — 1933–? • Genre — Children's literature • Children — Susan, John • Website — armstrongsperry.com

Born the third and youngest son of a businessman in New Haven, Sperry attended Stamford Preparatory School from 1908 to 1915. His older brother Paul A. Sperry invented what became the first boat shoe, the Sperry Top-Sider. He attended the Art Students League of New York from 1915 to 1918, where he studied with F. Luis Mora and George Bellows. He then studied at the Yale School of Art in the fall of 1918 until drafted into the United States Navy at the very end of World War I. Inspired by reading the work of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London as a boy, and then Frederick O'Brien's White Shadows in the South Seas in 1919, he traveled around the South Pacific from October 1920 to May 1921, spending time on Tahiti, Raiatea, Bora Bora, New Zealand, Australia, the Fiji Islands, and Hawaii. In December 1921, one of his paintings of the South Seas was exhibited at the Art Centre, NYC. In the summer of 1922, Sperry was introduced to Kenneth Emory, an ethnologist at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, by his foster sister, Anne Kinnear. He spent the spring of 1923 studying at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, and continued to enroll at the Art Students League during the 1920s and early 1930s. From September 1924 to May 1925, he was employed as an assistant to Kenneth Emory on board the Kaimiloa, a yacht owned by Medford Kellum, sailing from Hawaii to Fanning Island, Christmas Island, Malden Island, Penrhyn Island, Tahiti, Bora Bora and Raiatea on scientific research, before sailing to San Francisco in June 1925. During the voyage he continued to paint, later exhibiting his work in Honolulu. • Illustration — Dustjacket by Armstrong Sperry for the first edition of Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs Returning to New York in 1925, he worked in an advertising agency, "drawing vacuum cleaners, milk bottles, Campbell's Soup, etc.", then he had steady work as an illustrator of pulp romances, primarily for All-Story Love Stories for the Frank A. Munsey Company, and adventure and romance newspaper serials for Metropolitan Newspaper Service/United Feature Syndicate, including many 72-part stories by Mildred Barbour. He started writing his own adventure stories with tales of the South Seas that were syndicated by Metropolitan. He illustrated books and dust jackets for other writers, including the first edition of Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1929 and the first of several books he would illustrate for Helen Follet, Magic Portholes in 1932. He married Margaret Robertson, a medical doctor and daughter of San Francisco bookseller and publisher A. M. Robertson, in 1930, whom he had met on his trip to Hawaii in 1925.