Summer Reading Classics Three-Book Collection

Louise Fitzhugh (1928-1974) was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She attended Bard College, studied art in Italy and France, and continued her studies in New York at the Art Students League and at Cooper Union. Harriet the Spy was her first novel for children.

Norton Juster is an architect and planner, professor emeritus of design at Hampshire College, and the author of a number of highly acclaimed children’s books, including The Dot and the Line, which was made into an Academy Award-winning animated film. He has collaborated with Sheldon Harnick on the libretto for an opera based on The Phantom Tollbooth. The musical adaptation, with a score by Arnold Black, premiered in 1995 and will soon be performed in schools and theaters nationwide. An amateur cook and professional eater, Mr. Juster lives with his wife in Amherst, Massachusetts.Jules Feiffer is the author of two books for young readers, The Man in the Ceiling and A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears. He has won a number of prizes for his cartoons, plays, and screenplays. Mr. Feiffer lives in New York City.

Wilson Rawls grew up on a small farm in the Ozark Mountains of Oklahoma. There were no schools where he lived so his mother taught Rawls and his sisters how to read and write. He says that reading the book The Call of the Wild changed his life and gave him the notion that he would like to grow up to write a book like it. He shared his dream with his father, and his father gave him the encouraging advice, "Son, a man can do anything he sets out to do, if he doesn’t give up." Rawls never forgot his father’s words, and went on to create two novels about his boyhood that have become modern classics.