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This article offers an introduction to the history of oral storytelling in public libraries in the United States and contextualizes selected key figures in public library storytelling in the twentieth century. These women, including Anna Cogswell Tyler, FrancesJenkins Olcott, Mary Gould Davis, Elizabeth Nesbitt, and others, were educated at Carnegie Library Training School in Pittsburgh and the School of Library Science at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and subsequently trained additional librarian storytellers who took their skills to libraries across the United States. The publications of identified librarian storytellers, particularly as regards recommended story collections and instructional titles on storytelling, are briefly discussed. Content is partially drawn from Del Negro's 2007 dissertation, "A Trail of Stones and Breadcrumbs: Evaluating Folktales for Youth, 1905-2000"
Storytelling in Public Libraries
The tradition of oral storytelling in public libraries in the United States is more than a century old. Building on the popularity of storytelling in kindergartens and settlement houses, storytelling moved easily into the mainstream of library services for youth at the turn of the twentieth century (Baker and Greene, Storytelling [1977] 7). By 1927 there were storytelling programs in 79 percent of the public libraries in the United States, along with storytelling outreach services to park districts, schools, hospitals, and other institutions (ALA, Childrens Library Yearbook 44).
Under the direction of Mary Wright Plummer and her protégé, Anne Carroll Moore, Pratt Institute Free Library in Brooklyn, New York, established storytelling as a regular part of library services to school-age youth. Moore administered storytelling programs in the children's room of the Pratt Institute Free Library in Brooklyn as early as 1896 (Baker and Greene, Storytelling [1977] 5-6).
The storytelling tour of Marie Shedlock (1854-1935), schoolteacher, storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen interpreter, and later author of The Art of the Storyteller (1916), is a formative moment in American library storytelling. From 1902 to 1907 Shedlock toured libraries in the United States, demonstrating the art of storytelling in performances and workshops. An impressed Mary Wright Plummer, then head of the School of Library Science at Pratt Institute, invited Shedlock to lecture to the trustees, directors, and faculty of Pratt Institute Free Library (Pellowski, World of Storytelling 98; Baker and Greene, Storytelling [1977] 4). Anne Carroll Moore (then Pratt Institute children's librarian...