Rachel Field, the first woman to win the Newbery Medal, once said: "It is humiliating to confess that I wasn't one of those children who are remembered by their old school teachers as clever and promising." In fact, Rachel Field was more than ten years old before she could read, "though for some strange reason (that is perhaps significant now) I could write, after a fashion."

It was not that she did not know the letters, words, and mechanics of reading, but she was blessed with a mother who read to her endlessly, and Field found it much more pleasant to hear someone read good literature to her than to settle for "the infantile sort of stuff I could have read myself." "I was notably lazy and behind others of my own age in everything except drawing pictures, acting in plays, and committing pieces of poetry to memory...