"At times I refuse to be moved"; so says the five-year-old heroine of Louise Fitzhugh's posthumous picture book I Am Five (1978). She shares her obstinacy with many of Fitzhugh's characters. The people in Fitzhugh's darkly satiric (and often hilarious) novels are unyielding eccentrics, condemned by their temperaments to repeat the same actions again and again. Fitzhugh savagely criticized the self-indulgence of their inflexibility; but she also sympathized with her young protagonists' growing acceptance of their own rigidity, and of the tragic but exhilarating inability of human beings to ever be anything but themselves. Despite the fading contemporaneity of Fitzhugh's writing, her novels still cleverly express the differences between individuality and eccentricity, and between what one owes others and what one deserves oneself. As her treatment of once-controversial issues becomes less shocking, Fitzhugh's merit as a tough-minded satirist becomes more apparent.

The daughter of Millsaps Fitzhugh and Louise Perkins...