This book consists of six extraordinary creators of children's literature - Dr Seuss, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Astrid Lindgren, Chinua Achebe, P.L. Travers, and with Lona and Peter Opie, the great contemporary scholars of children's lore, games, and language. In seven broad-ranging incisive essay-interviews, the author explores with these authors themselves the lives of their created characters and the characters of their own lives. Despite differences in nationality, generation, and gender, all share with Cott an impassioned sense of the richness, complexity, and lucidity of childhood, and of the enduring importance pf children's literature in the lives of all of us, the readers.