Katherine Alice Applegate is simultaneously one of America's most famous authors and one of America's most mysterious. She guards her privacy, as does her publisher, Scholastic. Applegate was already a well-established writer of books for young readers, mostly romance novels, when she proposed the "Animorphs" series to Scholastic. She wanted to write a series of books that showed how the world might look from the perspectives of different animals; the result has been a series of fascinating novellas for middle-school-aged children.

Having moved around the United States several times, the Michigan-born writer now resides in Minneapolis. Applegate was born in 1956. She has published over a hundred books, writing them at an amazing pace.

Her "Animorphs" series started in 1996 and numbers over forty books plus several spin-offs by 2001. Her series intended for adolescents, "Everworld," began in 1999 and numbers nine volumes by the end of 2000. Sally...