Patricia Clapp (1912 – 2003) was an American writer of fiction for children and young adults. Her first novel, Constance: A Story of Early Plymouth (1968) is based on the life of her forbear Constance Hopkins, a passenger on the Mayflower. It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1969. Her second book, Jane-Emily (1969) was described by the New York Times nearly fifty years after its publication as "one of the great children’s ghost stories, featuring a nasty little dead girl who is not at all pleased when a good little living girl comes to stay in her old house." Most of Clapp's novels were written as fictionalized accounts of historical events. I'm Deborah Sampson: A Soldier in the War of the Revolution is loosely based on the life of Deborah Sampson, a young woman who disguised herself as a man and served in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment during the Revolutionary War. Witches' Children: A Story of Salem (1982) and The Tamarack Tree: A Novel of the Siege of Vicksburg (1986) explore the history of the Salem witch trials and the Siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War, respectively.
