Lois Lowry, best known for her six Anastasia Krupnik adventures, has enjoyed popularity with readers and critics alike. Her thirteen books for children, featuring realistic themes and delightful characters, help them answer their own questions about life, self-identity, and human relationships.

The daughter of Robert E. Hammersberg, an army dentist, and Katharine Landis Hammersberg, Lowry was born in Honolulu, lived in Pennsylvania during World War II and in Japan after the war, attended private school in Brooklyn, and then completed two years at Brown University. In 1956, at nineteen, she quit college to marry Donald Grey Lowry. Working part-time so her husband could finish his law degree at Harvard, she had four children by the time she was twenty-five. Lowry later completed her B.A. degree in writing at the University of Maine in 1972. In the 1970s she wrote two textbooks, Black American Literature and Literature of the American...