Christopher Pearse Cranch's two Huggermugger or Little Jacket books are milestones in the development of nondidactic literature for children and of American fantasy. Although they are known today only to specialists, both books remain highly readable, and the second, Kobboltozo, is by almost any standard a work of considerable merit.

Cranch was born in the District of Columbia, the youngest son of William Cranch, a prominent jurist, and Anna Greenleaf Cranch. After graduating from Columbian College in Washington, he was trained at Harvard as a Unitarian minister and served churches in New England, the Midwest, and the South. By 1840 he had moved to Boston, where he was sympathetic to transcendentalism and became a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson; in 1856, he supplied a memorial tribute to Margaret Fuller for a collection of some of her fugitive works. In Boston, he came to know most of the prominent writers. He...