Author and photographer Raymond Bial has been creating photo-essays and other books for many years. His more than eighty critically-acclaimed books for children and adults, including Amish Home, The Underground Railroad, Where Lincoln Walked, One-Room School, Ghost Towns of the American West, Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side, and many others. His subjects range from farm life to American social and cultural history. He has published two popular collections of fiction for children: The Fresh Grave and Other Ghostly Stories and The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek.

About his love for photography he says, “Just as when I was a child, I still love to be outside, absolutely free, making photographs. With every photograph I try to recapture that heightened sense of feeling for people, places, and things that meant so much to me as a child. I believe that adults as well as children should live not only in their minds, but through their senses.”

Raymond has recently worked on “Lifeways,” a popular series of twenty-eight books about Native American peoples published by Marshall Cavendish, and “American Community.” Raymond recently published Where Washington Walked for Walker and is currently working a book on Nauvoo for Houghton Mifflin. His books have received many awards from the American Library Association, Children’s Book Council, and many other organizations.

For more than thirty years, Raymond worked as a librarian in public, small colleges, and university libraries. He also taught graduate courses at the University of Illinois. He now works at home, where he lives with his wife, Linda, and children, Sarah and Luke, in Urbana, Illinois. His daughter Anna is a fashion designer in New York City.

Raymond has also made photographs or written essays for many books and other publications, such as the following:

• Research, hand-printing, and curatorial work with historical photographs for the acclaimed book entitled Upon a Quiet Landscape: the Photographs of Frank Sadorus.
• Photographs for Marcia Adams Heirloom Recipes by Marcia Adams. New York: Clarkson Potter, Inc., 1994.
• Photoessay published in Townships, a collection of essays published by the University of Iowa Press in 1992.
• Introduction to Beneath an Open Sky, a book of photographs by Gary Irving. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
  

Learn about the many different types of books that will appeal to readers of all ages that Raymond has written and illustrated.

Building America
Photoessays for Children
Native American Books
Fiction for Children
Collections of Photographs
Photography Guides and Other Works

Full alphabetical listing of books by Raymond Bial
Titles only
Titles and cover photos (warning,graphic intensive!)