"The First Book of Christmas Joy" by Dorothy Wilson, illustrated by Mary Ronin (1961)

MARY RONIN (1912 - 1992) was born in Sycamore, Illinois, to Jas Ronin, a horsetrainer and his wife Blanch Darling, and spent her childhood in Nebraska. After studying art at Omaha University, she arrived in New York, age twenty-five, and in June 1938 started working the advertising art department of Bloomingdale’s. From Bloomingdale’s, she moved to Young and Rubicam, where she took a position as an art director, one of the first female art directors in New York. After seven years with the advertising agency, she took a sabbatical year in France, returning to Manhattan in 1953 to freelance. Ronin worked thereafter as a book illustrator, and she is associated with a number of works published between 1959 and 1971.