Are some of the world's most talented children's book authors 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 Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and Wizard of Oz author Frank Baum, as well as Dr. Seuss and Salman Rushdie. Analyzing these and many others, Lurie shows how these gifted writers have used children's literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia, and the struggles of their own experiences. In clear, lively, unpretentious style, Lurie writes serious literary criticism about the best children's books, classic and contemporary. Most of these 14 essays first appeared in the New York Review of Books, and as in her first collection, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups (1990), she talks to adults about the stories and how they reflect the changing image of childhood. This time she also focuses on the writers' own lives and what their stories say about their growing up or not wanting to grow up. In a great piece on J. K. Rowling (a "folktale heroine," once a welfare mother, who "has clearly now become a fabulously rich princess"), Lurie places Harry Potter in the honorable tradition--from Tom Sawyer to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz-- where the child characters are neither perfect nor obedient, and it's not always easy to distinguish the adult ogre from the helpful giant. Neither condescending nor preachy, this is for parents, teachers, children's literature students, and for any reader who wonders why some stories are always with us. Hazel Rochman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Alison Lurie is the author of many highly praised novels, including The War Between the Tates , The Truth About Lorin Jones (Prix Femina Etranger), and Foreign Affairs (Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Her most recent book was Familiar Spirits . She teaches writing, folklore, and literature at Cornell University.