About Michael McCurdy
Book Illustrator, Author, Publisher

  Michael McCurdy was born in New York City and grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He attended Marblehead High School and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (where for a year his roommate was David McPhail, the well-known children's book author and illustrator. Book illustrator Wallace Tripp also shared the busy printmaking department with McCurdy and McPhail). Michael created his first wood engraving in 1962.

He was graduated as well from Tufts University in Medford, MA (B.F.A., M.F.A.), and in 1966 was awarded a traveling scholarship from the Museum School. A conscientious objector, he worked two years as an orderly in the orthopedic ward at Children's Hospital in Boston to fulfill his military obligation. When released from the hospital in1969, he and his wife used the grant to spend nearly five months traveling throughout Europe and the Soviet Union.

Michael has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Concord Academy (Concord, MA), and at Wellesley College's Book Arts Program. He also has had many exhibitions of his work, and currently 190 books contain his illustrations.

While publishing Penmaen Press Books (1968-1985), Michael produced significant small-press first editions by leading American and European writers and poets, including William Saroyan, Joyce Carol Oates, Howard Norman, William Stafford, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Coover, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Eberhart, Maxine Kumin, Leo Connellan, Rosellen Brown, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Sándor Csoóri, Richard Wilbur, Brian Swann, Robert Steiner, Anthony Hecht, Gerard Malanga, Philip Dacey, William Ferguson, X. J. Kennedy, and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Vicente Aleixandre.

Michael has authored books as well, which he has illustrated. These include Toward the Light (a collection of his wood engravings with accompanying anecdotes, published in Canada); The Illustrated Harvard: Harvard University in Wood Engravings and Words; The Devils Who Learned to be Good; Hannah's Farm: The Seasons on an Early American Homestead; The Old Man and the Fiddle, and Trapped by the Ice: Shackleton's Amazing Antarctic Adventure. He edited and illustrated an abridged version of Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, renamed Escape from Slavery: The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass in His Own Words, published in 1994. His latest authored and illustrated book is, An Algonquian Year: The Year According to the Full Moon.

Michael's studio is in his red barn in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, where the artist moved in 1981. The artist's former Penmaen Press was housed in the smaller barn building in the center of the photograph.

Michael's wood engravings and drawings are found in trade books for both adults and children and in fine limited editions. Major fine press letterpress editions Michael has illustrated include, The Winged Life: The Poetry of Henry David Thoreau (Yolla-Bolly Press, 1986 / reissued by Sierra Club Books); John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra (Yolla Bolly Press / reissued by Sierra Club Books, 1988); and David Mamet's play, American Buffalo (Arion Press, 1992). He has also designed and illustrated the John Muir Library Series for Sierra Club Books.

Howard Norman's The Owl-Scatterer included Michael's engravings and book design and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Illustrated Children's Books of 1986. Ann Whitford Paul's book The Seasons Sewn: The Year in Patchwork received the same recognition from the Times in 1996. Michael's collection of engravings, Toward the Light, was awarded the Bronze Medal in an international book exhibition in Leipzig in 1983. Other books have received awards from the New England Book Show and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Michael McCurdy is included in Who's Who in American Art, Who's Who in America,
Contemporary Authors, and Something About the Author. He was chosen as a Literary Light for 2002 by the Art Associates of the Boston Public Library. He will be listed in a new edition of Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults and
 will be included in the next edition of Anita Silvey's Children's Books and Their Creators.

Recent Books | Forthcoming Books | Older Books | Thoreau-McCurdy Note Cards | Clients
Corporate Commissions | Galleries | McCurdiana | McCurdy's News | Penmaen Press
Animal Note Cards | McCurdy's Online Print Gallery

Michael's Home Page