Although Virginia Lee Burton wrote and illustrated only seven of her own books, and illustrated only six others, she is recognized as one of the major American children's author-illustrators of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing to her books a keen awareness of children's story interests--the result of her meticulous research on each of her subjects, her great skill as a book designer, and her perfectionist's attention to color and detail--she created a series of narratives in which her central characters overcome threatening forces which symbolize the pressures America faced as it moved from a simple, pastoral lifestyle to one of increasing impersonality, urbanization, and planned obsolescence.

Virginia Burton (the middle name Lee was added at the suggestion of her high-school principal) was born in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, 30 August 1909, the daughter of Lena Dalkeith Yates Burton, a playwright, and Alfred E. Burton, the first dean of...