William H. Armstrong

He died in 1999 at his home in Kent, Connecticut at the age of 87.

Hampden-Sydney College awarded Armstrong an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1986.

He continued to be prolific in his writing output, mainly publishing books with historical or biblical main characters, such as Hadassah: Esther the Orphan Queen (1972) and The Education of Abraham Lincoln (1974).

By the mid 1970s, enriched by earnings from Sounder, Armstrong was thoroughly ensconced in Kent School. He raised sheep for passover on a beautiful hillside piece of property provided by the school and reportedly charged Kent $1 per year for his academic services.

In 1969, Armstrong published his masterpiece, an eight-chapter novel titled Sounder about an African-American sharecropping family. Praised by critics, Sounder won the John Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1970, and was adapted into a major motion picture in 1972 starring Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson. Despite its success, it was criticized by some African-Americans because they claimed that a white writer couldn't really understand their experience. Moreover, it reinforced the idea that self-help and limited non-material advancements were sufficient to ameliorate structural poverty in the American South.

In 1956, at the request of his school headmaster, he published his first book, a study guide called Study Is Hard Work. Armstrong followed this title with numerous other self-help books, and in 1963 he was awarded the National School Bell Award of the National Association of School Administrators for distinguished service in the interpretation of education.

After growing up on a farm near Lexington, Armstrong graduated from the Augusta Military Academy. He attended Hampden-Sydney College, where he wrote for the college newspaper and edited its literary magazine. Armstrong graduated cum laude in 1936, then continued his higher education with graduate work at the University of Virginia. He farmed in Connecticut near the Housatonic River, also learning to be a carpenter and a stonemason. In 1945, he became a history master at Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, where he remained for 52 years, teaching general studies, classics, and ancient history to generations of ninth grade students.

William Howard Armstrong (September 14, 1911 – April 11, 1999) was an American children's author and educator, best known for his 1969 novel Sounder, which won the Newbery Medal.