‘The best book on the classics of the genre I have ever read’ John Bayley, New York Review of Books

Are some of the world’s most talented writers of children’s books essentially children themselves? In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer prize-winning author Alison Lurie considers this theory, exploring children’s classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them, including Louisa May Alcott, creator of Little Women, and Salman Rushdie and his Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Dr Seuss and J. K. Rowling. In analysing these and many other authors, Alison Lurie shows how these gifted writers have used children’s literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia and the struggles of their own experience.