About Eve LaPlante
Eve’s latest book is the “powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) picture book Who Needs a Statue? (Tilbury House), coauthored by Margy Burns Knight and illustrated by Alix Delinois. “A gallery of intrepid American groundbreakers, pathfinders, and activists who have earned commemorative statues,” Kirkus added. “Deserving but less prominent luminaries shine more brightly here.”
In a starred review, Booklist described Who Needs a Statue? as “innovative... This inclusive and fresh approach to communities will pep up local history collections... Expressive illustrations captured with a dynamic color palate portray kids posing next to sculptures, adding immediacy to the bronze and marble works.” Publishers Weekly praised Who Needs a Statue? as “a reportorial work that opens conversations about public representation… LaPlante, making a children’s book debut, and Knight (Africa Is Not a Country) introduce sculptures across the country that immortalize people of color and women... Paintings by Delinois (Greetings, Leroy) show scenes from the subjects’ lives as well as the statues in their settings.”
Eve’s first book, Seized, published in 1993 and still in print, is a narrative portrait of a common brain disorder that can alter personality. The psychological implications of Seized are “staggering,” Publishers Weekly noted. In this “fascinating account of medical research,” Howard Gardner said, “LaPlante shows how a brain scar may cause bizarre aggressive or sexual behavior – and works of profound creative imagination,” including works by Dostoevsky, van Gogh, and Lewis Carroll. Kirkus Reviews said, “LaPlante’s descriptions of the human brain are wonderfully concrete, her historical research is well presented, and her empathy for TLE’s victims is clear.”
Eve has published three ancestor biographies. American Jezebel tells the true story of Anne Hutchinson, the colonial teacher and founding mother. Salem Witch Judge, about Samuel Sewall, the 1692 judge who became an abolitionist and feminist, won the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. NPR named Marmee & Louisa, Eve’s dual biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, a top ten book of the year. Eve also collected and edited a companion volume to Marmee & Louisa, a compilation of writings by Abigail May Alcott, My Heart Is Boundless.
As a biographer, according to the Boston Book Festival, Eve has been “praised as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In the anthology Boston, which includes the preface to American Jezebel, Shaun O’Connell wrote, “Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras ... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century.”
Eve has four adult children and lives in Massachusetts with her husband. She has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
In a starred review, Booklist described Who Needs a Statue? as “innovative... This inclusive and fresh approach to communities will pep up local history collections... Expressive illustrations captured with a dynamic color palate portray kids posing next to sculptures, adding immediacy to the bronze and marble works.” Publishers Weekly praised Who Needs a Statue? as “a reportorial work that opens conversations about public representation… LaPlante, making a children’s book debut, and Knight (Africa Is Not a Country) introduce sculptures across the country that immortalize people of color and women... Paintings by Delinois (Greetings, Leroy) show scenes from the subjects’ lives as well as the statues in their settings.”
Eve’s first book, Seized, published in 1993 and still in print, is a narrative portrait of a common brain disorder that can alter personality. The psychological implications of Seized are “staggering,” Publishers Weekly noted. In this “fascinating account of medical research,” Howard Gardner said, “LaPlante shows how a brain scar may cause bizarre aggressive or sexual behavior – and works of profound creative imagination,” including works by Dostoevsky, van Gogh, and Lewis Carroll. Kirkus Reviews said, “LaPlante’s descriptions of the human brain are wonderfully concrete, her historical research is well presented, and her empathy for TLE’s victims is clear.”
Eve has published three ancestor biographies. American Jezebel tells the true story of Anne Hutchinson, the colonial teacher and founding mother. Salem Witch Judge, about Samuel Sewall, the 1692 judge who became an abolitionist and feminist, won the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. NPR named Marmee & Louisa, Eve’s dual biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, a top ten book of the year. Eve also collected and edited a companion volume to Marmee & Louisa, a compilation of writings by Abigail May Alcott, My Heart Is Boundless.
As a biographer, according to the Boston Book Festival, Eve has been “praised as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In the anthology Boston, which includes the preface to American Jezebel, Shaun O’Connell wrote, “Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras ... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century.”
Eve has four adult children and lives in Massachusetts with her husband. She has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
Feel free to contact the author at [email protected].
For a review copy of Who Needs A Statue? please contact publicist Julia Hlavac at (734) 619-6226 or [email protected]
For a review copy of Marmee & Louisa or My Heart Is Boundless, please contact publicist Erin Reback at (212) 698-7426 or [email protected].
For a review copy of Salem Witch Judge or American Jezebel, please contact publicist Julie Burton at (415) 477-4407 or julie.burton@harpercollins.com.
To schedule an interview or event, please email [email protected] or [email protected].
For a review copy of Who Needs A Statue? please contact publicist Julia Hlavac at (734) 619-6226 or [email protected]
For a review copy of Marmee & Louisa or My Heart Is Boundless, please contact publicist Erin Reback at (212) 698-7426 or [email protected].
For a review copy of Salem Witch Judge or American Jezebel, please contact publicist Julie Burton at (415) 477-4407 or julie.burton@harpercollins.com.
To schedule an interview or event, please email [email protected] or [email protected].