Janet Lunn has staked out the past as her special literary territory. The American-born Canadian author has mined aspects of the Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, and frontier life in Canada in her fifteen novels, picture books, and histories. Employing time travel and telepathy in her stories, Lunn has attracted a wide variety of readers in both Canada and the United States with such award-winning novels as The Root Cellar, Shadow in Hawthorn Bay, and The Hollow Tree. In illustrated books for older readers, Charlotte and One Hundred Shining Candles, Lunn has also brought historical times to life, and in her picture books she has told of sweaters, cheeky ducks, umbrellas, and fairs.

Born in 1928, in Dallas, Texas, Lunn was raised in Vermont and in the suburbs of New York City. She recalled her childhood home in Something about the Author Autobiography Series ( SAAS): "We lived on...