Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards was a prolific writer of fiction and poetry for children and for adults. She wrote over ninety books, and one of her works for children, Tirra Lirra: Rhymes Old and New, remained in print for forty-eight years, a good record for a volume of verse. Richards has the distinction of being the first prominent American writer of nonsense verse for children, and until the past decade or so, the only woman to have written this kind of verse.

Richards's father, Samuel Gridley Howe, was principally an educator who worked with the blind, deaf, and mute. He was the main founder of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind and the first person to teach a completely blind and deaf mute, Laura Bridgman, to communicate successfully with others. Laura Richards would eventually tell the story in her juvenile biography of Laura Bridgman (for...