He wrote and illustrated books set in Florida, where he grew up and returned to live for many years, and in North Carolina, where he later moved, and in Alabama, where he also lived at one time. Now that I've put together this detailed bibliography (see below) and learned that he also wrote and illustrated for various magazines, I suspect he kept extremely busy and that there are other books he illustrated that have not yet been identified. My question was how he managed to support himself with the relatively few books he was credited with having written. I used the public version of WorldCat and ViaLibri to locate books and images of book covers. He started out as an illustrator and I decided to put together as full a bibliography as possible since neither the fan website nor the official biographies list all of Key's own books or those he illustrated. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and later taught at the Studio School of Art, also in Chicago. As a native Chicagoan, I was astounded to find that Key lived in Chicago. Warning, a lot of the links at that website do not work but it does have some interesting information. The fan website Thru the Forgotten Door gives a pretty fair biography of Key. One of my favorite library school professors, Kate McDowell wrote an appreciation of him for the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. Because he lived in North Carolina for years and set a number of his books there, the University of North Carolina collected information about some of his books in their literary scrapbook collection. His papers are at the fabulous de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has a biographical entry in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, 3rd edition (1991) and Contemporary Authors Online (2008). To my surprise, no one seems to have written any scholarly articles or dissertations about Key and his work. I started digging for information on him in order to shape my post. Recently, I rather promised Jen Robinson that I would do a post on Alexander Key, after finding we both fondly remembered his book, The Forgotten Door. Any child would like the idea they could make a difference (smile).
The underlying message of these books I think was that the future belonged to the children and that if adults listened to children, the world would be a better place.
He also portrayed children with ESP and from other worlds.
While Key often shows children fleeing villains and in danger, there is always a happy ending with children returning home and winning out over their enemies. I also have fond memories of the Witch Mountain movies. Among the many books from my childhood that I have kept and treasured all these years are books by Alexander Key, such as The Forgotten Door, Escape to Witch Mountain, Return From Witch Mountain and The Sword of Aradel.
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