Edward Eager

Edward McMaken Eager was born on June 20, 1911, in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up there before attending Harvard University, graduating with the class of 1935. Following graduation, he relocated to New York City, where he lived for fourteen years before eventually settling in Connecticut. In 1938 he married Jane Eberly, and the couple had one son, Fritz. Eager died of lung cancer on October 23, 1964, in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of 53.

Eager built a career as a lyricist, dramatist, and composer working across Broadway, television, radio, and opera. Among his earliest theatrical credits was The Village Barber, an operetta with book and lyrics by Eager set to music by Johann Schenk, produced by the Columbia Theater Associates at Brander Matthews Hall in New York City in 1942. The following year he contributed to Pudding Full of Plums, and in 1944 he wrote three new numbers alongside composer Elie Siegmeister for Sing Out, Sweet Land!, a salute to American folk and popular music. Also in 1944, Eager wrote the lyrics for Dream with Music, a musical fantasy in which a soap opera writer dreams she is Scheherazade in old Baghdad, with her real-life acquaintances appearing as figures such as Aladdin and the Sultan. The score drew on classical compositions by Schubert, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, Weber, Chopin, Wagner, Haydn, and Foster, as assembled by Clay Warnick, and the production featured choreography by George Balanchine.

In 1946, Eager contributed book and lyrics to the Beachcomber Club Revue of 1946, with music by John Frederick Coots. His 1950 musical The Liar, for which he co-wrote the book with Alfred Drake and supplied the lyrics to John Mundy's music, was a new musical comedy produced on Broadway. That same year, Eager and Drake collaborated again on an English-language adaptation of Ugo Betti's play Il giocatore, retitled The Gambler. Eager also wrote the book and lyrics for To Hell With Orpheus, a comic opera adapting music by Jacques Offenbach, produced at St. John Terrell's Music Circus in Lambertville, New Jersey, with a cast that included Jo Sullivan, wife of Frank Loesser.

On April 14, 1956, Eager contributed lyrics to The Adventures of Marco Polo, a television production with music by Clay Warnick and Mel Pahl and a book by William Friedberg and Neil Simon. The cast featured Alfred Drake and Doretta Morrow, who had originated the leading roles in Broadway's Kismet, and the score was built around themes by Rimsky-Korsakov. Columbia Records released a cast recording of the production. Later that same year, on June 9, 1956, Eager wrote lyrics for NBC's Holiday, a television musical loosely adapted from Johann Strauss and organized around Elmer Rice's play The Grand Tour, with a cast that included Doretta Morrow, Keith Andes, Kitty Carlisle, Bambi Lynn, Tammy Grimes, George S. Irving, and Jacques d'Amboise. Also in 1956, Eager wrote the libretto for The Toledo War, an operatic parlor piece with music by David Broekman, broadcast on the CBS Radio Workshop on May 4, 1956.

Eager's later theatrical work included the libretto for Miranda and the Dark Young Man, with music by Elie Siegmeister, in 1957, and Dr. Willy Nilly with composer Pembroke Davenport in 1959. In 1963, he wrote the libretto for Gentlemen, Be Seated!, a work with music by Jerome Moross produced by the New York City Opera, featuring Dick Shawn and Alice Ghostley. That same year he adapted Luigi Pirandello's play as Call It Virtue. His final theatrical credit was a lyric translation of the Italian musical Rugantino in 1964. Throughout the 1950s and into 1963, Eager also worked as a lyricist for NBC Opera Theater.

Beyond the theater, Eager became widely known as a writer of children's fiction. A childhood admirer of L. Frank Baum's Oz series, he began writing children's books when he found himself unable to locate stories he wished to read aloud to his young son Fritz. His novels were primarily contemporary low fantasy, centering on the appearance of magic in the lives of ordinary children. He frequently acknowledged his debt to the British author E. Nesbit, whom he regarded as the finest children's author of all time, and his Tales of Magic series — seven novels published between 1954 and 1962, all illustrated by N. M. Bodecker and published by Harcourt, Brace — reflected that influence directly. The series included Half Magic (1954), Knight's Castle (1956), Magic by the Lake (1957), The Time Garden (1958), Magic or Not? (1959), The Well-Wishers (1960), and Seven-Day Magic (1962). Half Magic became a number-one seller in the United States, and Knight's Castle received the Ohioana Book Award for Juvenile Literature in 1957. Eager also published standalone picture books, including Red Head (1951), Mouse Manor (1952), and Playing Possum (1955), and contributed articles on children's literature to The Horn Book Magazine.