Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
This is the second book that my three children and I have done for National Geographic, the first being ANIMAL STORIES.
NG asked us to do the first book, we pitched the second. I made a rough outline and once NG gave us a contract for the book, we divided up who would do which sections.
I have always loved Chagall’s bizarre, colorful flying-in-the-sky-fiddler’s-on-the-roof pictures. And so when Pat Lewis (now Children’s Poet Laureate of America) and I started talking about doing some books of poetry together, I offerred Chagall and his action-packed life to Pat as a prospect. We had
The idea for this book began with illustrator Jim Burke. We had done several books together and he was a big fan of Wagner’s. I had been a huge Brooklyn Dodgers fan in my youth, and later on a Boston Red Sox fan when we moved to Massachusetts. But around the
Yes, I published PIRATES IN PETTICOATS back in 1963, but this book about women pirates is not a simple retread. It is entirely different, some new pirates added (like Grania O’Malley and Queen Teuta and Artemesia) and some dubious ones from the first book dropped. There is much more pirate
I have been a long-time fan of Hans Christian Andersen’s work. My favorites include “The Snow Queen,” “The Nightingale” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Occasionally I am called “America’s Hans Christian Andersen,” to which I sometimes respond,
When we were still in the research phase of this book, Heidi and her daughters and their friends, the Napiers of Myrtle Beach, went on a road trip to Salem to get the feel of the area and pick up more books. Heidi came back with a bumper sticker that said,
TAKE JOY is filled with 40 years of my insights, rants, jokes, and pleasure in the writing trade. Some of the essays began as speeches, some as articles, some as journal entries, some as moments of inspiration. I hope all of them help writers–old, new, and in-between.
With the upcoming Wright Brothers anniversary, every publisher in the world was planning a book about them. One of my editors (a favorite) called and asked me to do a picture book about the dynamic duo. I said, “Not unless I can find a new way into the story.”
In many ways this book was the hardest of all to write so far of the Unsolved Mysteries, because it had three separate stories of travel to America by boat, with slaughters on all sides, and then a missing colony. Also, because it dealt in part with
This book, about two feral children found in India in the 1920s and brought to an orphanage, is the second in a series of real-life unsolved mysteries for kids which I have written with my daughter Heidi Stemple. The first,