Boys And Girls Forever

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Summary

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.

About the author

Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie published ten novels, among them Foreign Affairs (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina étranger), and The Last Resort. She was also the author of many works of non-fiction, including The Language of Clothes, Don't Tell the Grownups, Familiar Spirits, and two collections of essays and reviews, Reading for Fun and Words and Worlds. She taught literature, folklore and creative writing at Cornell University for many years and was the Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita. She lived in upstate New York but also spent much time in Key West, Florida and in London, all of which provided settings for her fiction. She married the writer Edward Hower, and had three sons and three grandchildren. Alison Lurie died in 2020.

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