Van Stockum and the couple's six children were in tow for Marlin's peripatetic assignments, and it seems nothing short of miraculous that she managed to write and illustrate a score of children's books. During the next four decades she averaged one book per year written, illustrated, translated or some combination. It had a foreword by her aunt-by-marriage, Edna St. She had written and illustrated her first book for children, A Day on Skates, in 1934. Not surprisingly then, Van Stockum was, in fact, raising a family in Washington, D.C., at the time, having married Marlin, who by 1935 was a Roosevelt administration official.
She often used her family as models for the written and illustrated characters in her books.
Van Stockum memorialized him in her book The Mitchells (1945), about the travails of raising a family in Washington, D.C., during the war.
Willem Van Stockum was killed piloting a bomber over France in 1944. Van Stockum attended art school in Amsterdam and later in Dublin, where she met and later married Ervin Ross "Spike" Marlin, who at the time was her brother Willem's roommate at Trinity College. She illustrated her first book, an Irish reader, in 1930, and her last book in 2001, giving her a 71-year career as a book-illustrator. In the 1920s, she worked as an illustrator for the Dublin-based publishing house, Browne & Nolan. A penchant for art evidently ran in the family, which counted the van Goghs as distant relatives. With no car and few companions, she recalled turning to writing out of boredom. Van Stockum was raised partly in Ireland, and also in Ymuiden, the seaport of Amsterdam, where her father was port commander. She was also a charter member of the Children's Book Guild and the only person to have served as its president for two consecutive terms. Born February 9, 1908, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Hilda van Stockum was a noted author, illustrator and painter, whose work has won the Newbery Honor and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Brotherhood Award.
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