"Some people are one way and some people are another and that's that" observed Louise Fitzhugh's best-known character, Harriet M. Welsch, in the ground-breaking young-adult novel Harriet the Spy. Calling this statement the "moral" of Fitzhugh's writing, Perry Nodelman noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography that "like Harriet ... Fitzhugh had an unfailing interest in the oddities of people, an uncanny ability to describe them in words and pictures." During her brief career, Fitzhugh wrote and illustrated several controversial yet enduringly popular stories about eccentric children struggling to cope with the rigidity of the adult world. "Fitzhugh's mastery in writing witty dialogue, her gift for creating memorable characters, and her moral honesty in relentlessly depicting psychologically realistic portraits of contemporary American children," Anita Moss wrote in Twentieth- Century Children's Writers, "have earned for her a lasting place in children's literature."

Distaste for the South

Fitzhugh was born in Memphis...