Margaret Olivia Ensor was born in London, England on October 6, 1908, daughter of the historian and journalist, Sir Robert Ensor. She grew up in Buckinghamshire, where she was educated at the Wycombe Abbey School. She later attended Somerville College at Oxford University, where her studies included Latin, Greek, and philosophy, and, despite hating them at first, majored in the classics. Her knowledge of these subjects, combined with her clarity and smoothness of style, helped earn her a place in the pantheon of children's literature. She graduated with a BA in 1931 and an MA in 1940, to begin a teaching career in both England and the United States.
In Germany, England and the U.S. she taught Greek, Latin, and English. In 1946 she married Archibald C. Coolidge of Connecticut, who already had four children.
Coolidge began writing as a child but it wasn't until after World War II that she started publishing, ending her career with a total of 29 books, most of them for young adults.. Most of her work addresses political and historical themes or retells classical mythology.
Her first book for children, Greek Myths, was published in 1949. She followed this up with Legends of the North in 1951, and then a companion volume to Greek Myths called The Trojan War in 1952. These mythological retellings demonstrate her careful research and adroit capacity to bring the past to life for readers. She was able to craft detailed pictures of the ancient world's customs and lifestyle, and make them integral to her stories. Throughout the 50s and 60s, she continued to write in this vein, writing both biographical anthologies and historical fiction set in Greece, Rome, Palestine, and Egypt. Men of Athens (1962) was a Newbery Honor book in 1963, an American Library Association Notable Book and was also on the Horn Book honor list.
In the later 60s and 70s, she turned most of her attention to young adult biographies, which include Winston Churchill (1960), Edith Wharton (1964), Eugene O'Neill (1966), George Bernard Shaw (1968), Tom Paine, Revolutionary (1969), Gandhi (1971), Joseph Conrad (1972), and a pair of volumes about Abraham Lincoln (1974 and 1976). She also wrote one biography for adults during this period, but her publisher preferred to stick to children's literature, so the manuscript was set aside for many years, until it resurfaced in the 1990s. Coolidge, then ninety-one, generously donated it to the Gardiner Library Association for publication and Danny Smith, a historian in Gardiner, edited the manuscript and prepared its introduction, bibliography, and a genealogy.
Her biographies and historical fiction have been widely praised for their accuracy and attention to detail. One such review from Horn Book, in a review of Gandhi:
"Olivia Coolidge's biographies are models of objective and unobtrusive scholarship. She has the ability to write about passionate, eccentric men in a way that gives full credit to their particular kind of genius, but acknowledges their shortcomings and failures as well."
She died at the age of 98 on December 10, 2006, in Essex, survived by her brother, her four stepchildren, 15 grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren.
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