E.L. Konigsburg, whose tale of siblings who run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, From the Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, has delighted readers young and old for decades, passed away last week in Falls Church, Virginia. The 83-year-old had suffered a stroke and been hospitalized twice recently.

The NY Times reports that she was "a children’s author and illustrator who twice received the nation’s highest award in children’s literature — she won it in 1968 for her second book, edging out the runner-up, which was her own first book." From The Mixed-Up Files, written in 1967, won the award while Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was the runner-up.

Born Elaine Lobl in Manhattan in 1930, she grew up small-town Pennsylvania, ultimately graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. But she only went to college after a series of jobs, including one as a bookkeeper at a meatpacking plant, where she met David Konigsburg, her future husband. She said of her upbringing, "Growing up in a small town, gives you two things: a sense of place and a feeling of self-consciousness — self-consciousness about one’s education and exposure, both of which tend to be limited. On the other hand, limited possibilities also mean creating your own options." She also once said, "One of the reasons I started writing is that I never felt I met children who were like me in the books I read. I would pick up a book and be promised that I would meet typical children in typical small towns, and the books always had children whose families had maids. And in my town, growing up, many of the mothers WERE maids. So I wanted to write about children like me."

While many of Konigsburg's books are wonderful (definitely read A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver which is about Eleanor of Aquitaine), From the Mixed-Up Files let readers in on Claudia and Jamie Kincaid's scheme to run away and live in one of the greatest museums in the world. Of course, Claudia had certain ideas about running away:

Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.

At the museum, they bathed in the fountain (and collected coins from it to do their laundry and buy food from the Automat) and hid from security guards by standing on the toilets in the bathrooms. And then they stumble onto a mystery involving a very rich old lady (Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler) and a statue that may or may not have been the work of Michelangelo! Thank you, E.L. Konigsburg.