Well, technically this is a Newbery Honor Book, an award she took twice more (for Clearing Weather and Swift Rivers, neither of which impressed me particularly. I think she's better at writing girls than boys, but keeps trying to write boys' stories; it's been enough years since I read either of those that I wouldn't swear to it, but it's a plausible hypothesis); her only Newbery Medal was for Invincible Louisa, a biography, also not really her best work iirc.
Checking publication dates, Kingdom of the Winding Road sadly was never eligible for a Newbery because it was published in 1915, but I'm not sure about the other two, from 1934 and 1936. They're not supposed to consider an author's previous body of work, only the particular slate of books for the year, so "because she'd already taken three Newbery Honors" is not a valid answer.
Wind in the Chimney was up against her own Invincible Louisa, so I suppose it had to be one or the other (although I'm pretty sure other authors have taken the Newbery Medal and an Honor in the same year); me, I'd've given it to Wind in the Chimney, though I'll have to consider that again when I re-read Invincible Louisa. As to The Covered Bridge, awesome though it is... 1936 put it up against Caddie Woodlawn AND The Good Master. What a year. *g*
Personally, I'm speculating that The Windy Hill - being published in the year of the first Newbery competition - was in some respect treated as a stand-in for all of her previous work, which was pretty darn impressive already. (It was her fifth book, I think, and iirc I've read all the other four and liked them better, though they all suffered from a certain amount of... idealistic pedantry, as did most of the kidlit of the time. She got better about that as she went along.)
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Checking publication dates, Kingdom of the Winding Road sadly was never eligible for a Newbery because it was published in 1915, but I'm not sure about the other two, from 1934 and 1936. They're not supposed to consider an author's previous body of work, only the particular slate of books for the year, so "because she'd already taken three Newbery Honors" is not a valid answer.
Wind in the Chimney was up against her own Invincible Louisa, so I suppose it had to be one or the other (although I'm pretty sure other authors have taken the Newbery Medal and an Honor in the same year); me, I'd've given it to Wind in the Chimney, though I'll have to consider that again when I re-read Invincible Louisa. As to The Covered Bridge, awesome though it is... 1936 put it up against Caddie Woodlawn AND The Good Master. What a year. *g*
Personally, I'm speculating that The Windy Hill - being published in the year of the first Newbery competition - was in some respect treated as a stand-in for all of her previous work, which was pretty darn impressive already. (It was her fifth book, I think, and iirc I've read all the other four and liked them better, though they all suffered from a certain amount of... idealistic pedantry, as did most of the kidlit of the time. She got better about that as she went along.)