Alison Uttley's contributions to literature for children younger than ten make her well deserving of a place in this volume. While much of her work was published after 1960, her first animal story appeared in 1929, and she is a contemporary of Enid Blyton. Uttley's anthropomorphic animals were compared, she felt to her disadvantage, with those of Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame. During the war years her books were published on government-regulation paper, and many a child clutched one of the Grey Rabbit or Sam Pig books as he went down into the air-raid shelters. One of her characters, Hare in the Little Grey Rabbit series, even joined the Home Guard. The Grey Rabbit books gave Uttley international fame, and her cult following grew as a result of her regular additions to her series of animal stories and of her publishers' attempts to offer a new book each year for...