“I am completely enchanted by The Big Sea and certainly it is the best thing you have done,” Carl Van Vechten wrote to Langston Hughes in November 1939. He had stayed up late to finish reading: “Not feeling very well I stayed in night before last and started reading
How comforting it must have been, with WWII well underway, for Mazo de la Roche to bring home her characters safely, from the front of WWI. The Whiteoak men return and bring with them a fellow serviceman, who takes a position in their household and, just like that, wartime is
Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy Tacy (1940) Illus. Lois Lenski Harper Collins, 1968 I first met Betsy, Tacy and Tib when I was nine or ten, but I didn't know them as well as I might have. I kept re-reading the third and fourth volumes of the series and never filled
Monica Dickens' Mariana Penguin, 1961 (1940); Persephone Books, 1999 Persephone No. 2 Monica Dickens is an author I thought of as a children's author first; I read her World's End books and Follyfoot stories as a girl, repeatedly. Not as compulsively as I read and re-read other stories, and I
