Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
I wrote the first draft of this counting rhyme on the drive home from New York City. Normally a three hour drive, it took me over five hours as I kept pulling off the road to scribble stuff down. Revisions took another couple of days. Very rare for me to work so quickly. The repetitive verse, in which the
Editor Linda Zuckerman was on a trip through New England and came across several Shaker sites. On the way home, she stopped for tea and asked me if I’d be interested in doing a non-fiction book on the Shakers. As I’d always been fascinated by them, I readily agreed, and after a year’s worth
My children and our acres of milkweed inspired this book about the day in the life of a little boy and his brother and sister. Local photographer Gabe Cooney took the pictures. The children were four, six, and eight at the time. We called the title page picture of Adam in the photographer’s oversized
This was the second collection of fairy tales I wrote and together with The Girl Who Cried Flowers and The Hundredth Dove led to my being called the Hans Christian Andersen of America. Putting the stories in a single volume was the idea of my astute and wonderful editor Ann K. Beneduce, and she had a hand in all my fairy tales for many years after.
A boy, a girl, and an albino deer who one special night becomes a unicorn. Some twenty years after it was a hardcover, the book came out in paperback. It was a Golden Kite honor book. It is now under option for the movies.
An original fairy tale about a fisherlad who meets a magical talking fish and rescues her, done with his own skills and not magic. I love the story, but the pictures puzzle me. It is clearly a Celtic story–all the clues are there: a green island, a coracle (a skin boat) and references to Irish poets and Scottish folk
A book about the history and mystery of bells, bell ringing, and bell making. As I say in the book: “Where men and their civilizations have flourished, bells flourished, their voices touching all fields of human endeavor.” Well, it was the 1970s and I wasn’t sufficiently smart enough to include women in
This folk parable of friendship began with the rock-and-roll song “Joy to the World” in which the group Three Dog Night sang “I’m a deep sea diver, I’m a rainbow rider. . .” and it started me thinking. English illustrator Michael Foreman’s glorious color-drenched pictures
This four-part fantasy novel reads like an expanded folk tale. There is a sea witch, a hero, a heroine, and a lot of magic. Patricia MacLachlan’s husband Bob claims that this is his favorite of my books. A Japanese edition came out in 1985, a Spanish edition in 1997.
Another one of my original fairy tales, this story came out of our nine-month camping trip in Europe, and especially our time in Greece. A boy with wings is born into a poor herder’s family, and he is considered deformed. But when he saves his father during a freak snow storm, he is