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Historian for the young

Dorothy Sterling, whose more than 35 books for children and adults included some of the first non-fiction works about black history for young readers, notably “Freedom Train,” about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, died on Monday at her home in Wellfleet, Mass. She was 95.

The death was confirmed by her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling.

A New Yorker with a passion for trees, flowers and bugs, Sterling found many of her subjects while following up on questions about the natural world posed by her two children.

While casting about for a biographical subject, she found inspiration in Tubman and her work for the Underground Railroad, which led to the groundbreaking “Freedom Train” in 1954, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum. Her research for that book using the Schomburg collection of the New York Public Library resulted in a series of books designed to introduce young readers to black history. These included “Captain of the Planter: The Story of Robert Smalls” (1958), about a former slave who captured a Confederate gunboat and later became a congressman from South Carolina, and “Lucretia Mott: Gentle Warrior” (1964), a biography of that Quaker abolitionist.

“I had found a subject about which I cared deeply,” Sterling wrote for the reference work “Something About the Author.” “At the age of 40, I had finally become a writer.”

Dorothy Dannenberg was born in Manhattan in 1913. A precocious student, she was plucked from Public School 46 in Washington Heights and placed in a special class for gifted students at a school farther downtown. She later attended the Dalton School and, at 15, won entrance to Wellesley College. She found it disappointing and transferred to Barnard, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1934, just in time to enter the ranks of the unemployed.

While working for the Federal Writers’ Project she met and married Philip Sterling, an unemployed journalist and later an author, who died in 1989. In addition to her daughter, Anne, of Providence, R.I., she is survived by a son, Peter, of Philadelphia; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. — New York Times News Service

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