William Holmes McGuffey, the second of eleven children of Alexander and Anna Holmes McGuffey, was born on 23 September 1800, on a farm near Washington, Pennsylvania. He became a teacher, professor, writer, and editor whose contribution to the field of children's literature lies not primarily in the creation of imaginative work but in the compiling of the McGuffey series of schoolbooks, the McGuffey Eclectic Readers. Some of what McGuffey included in the series was his own work; much of it was adapted from other sources, including other schoolbook series; other selections were by well-known writers or didactic verse written expressly for the series.

McGuffey's childhood from the age of two was spent near Youngstown, Ohio, in the hard life of rural America, the Northwest Territory of the pioneers. With his parents for his teachers, the boy read all that he could lay his hands on. He committed to memory many...