The Hundred Dresses (A Newbery Honor Book)

A Newbery Honor Book

Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses won a Newbery Honor in 1945 and has never been out of print since. At the heart of the story is Wanda Petronski, a Polish girl in a Connecticut school who is ridiculed by her classmates for wearing the same faded blue dress every day. Wanda claims she has one hundred dresses at home, but everyone knows she doesn’t and bullies her mercilessly. The class feels terrible when Wanda is pulled out of the school, but by that time it’s too late for apologies. Maddie, one of Wanda’s classmates, ultimately decides that she is “never going to stand by and say nothing again.” This powerful, timeless story has been reissued in paperback with a new letter from the author’s daughter Helena Estes, and with the Caldecott artist Louis Slobodkin’s original artwork in beautifully restored color.

ELEANOR ESTES (1906-1988), a children's librarian for many years, launched her writing career with the publication of The Moffats in 1941. Two of her books about the Moffats are Newbery Honor Books, as is The Hundred Dresses. She won the Newbery Medal for Ginger Pye in 1952.

LOUIS SLOBODKIN (1903-1975) illustrated more than ninety books for children, many of which he also wrote. Among his most enduring illustrations are those for the Moffats series by Eleanor Estes, and those for James Thurber's Many Moons, for which Slobodkin received the 1944 Caldecott Medal.

HELENA ESTES, the daughter of the author, is a children's librarian and a former bookseller. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.