From an acorn comes the oak. From a few typewritten pages without illustration came 11-year-old Harriet M. Welsch, one of the great 20th-century heroines of children’s fiction. Harriet’s creator, ...

Thousands of teenage aspiring writers found inspiration from the notebook-scribbling eleven-year-old girl in the best-selling 1964 novel Harriet the Spy. Some, myself included, became especially aware ...

When the children’s novel “Harriet the Spy” arrived in 1964, Leslie Brody was an 11-year-old on Long Island. That was just a short trip to the Upper East Side neighborhood of the fictional 11-year-old ...

Adult readers of children’s books are often surprised by the grownup lives of their creators. But after all, artists who choose the medium of children’s books to express their creativity are not ...

Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from ...

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of ‘Harriet the Spy’ By Leslie Brody How would the universe address you, if it thought there was something you urgently ...

You might be surprised to find out that the author of Harriet the Spy called her protagonist “a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all of her friends.” | Photo by Erin McCarthy She may be more ...

There is a certain alchemy by which canonical characters, especially the figures of children’s literature, come to exist outside of history. Stripped of their initial contexts, and cleansed of any ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy By Leslie Brody. Seal. 335 pp. $30. As a kid, I rarely read books hoping to see my particular story ...