Mary Norton

Mary Norton's gift for making the imaginary credible and for then using the imaginary to address deep-felt concerns about the human condition renders her one of the preeminent children's writers of the twentieth century.

Such universal themes as the permanence of memory, the value of stories and storytelling, the significance of children's relationships to adults, the quest for identity in an uncertain world, and the passage from childhood to maturity all find their way into her eight novels for children through a host of disarmingly fanciful characters.

In The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947) - the sources of the 1971 motion picture Bedknobs and Broomsticks - a timid apprentice witch provides adventure and imaginative release for two British children waiting out World War II in the United States.

In Norton's acclaimed novel The Borrowers and its four sequels (1952-1982) a band of six-inch tall beings lead a precarious yet determinedly dignified existence in cast-off boots and kettles and under the floorboards of country homes, subsisting on the flotsam and jetsam of the human beings towering above them. Homelessness is a constant threat; detection by their human hosts calls for immediate departure and a search for new quarters.

In Are All the Giants Dead? (1975) a boy enters the realm of aging fairy-tale figures after the conclusion of their great adventures, where life is not quite the happily-ever-after that fairy tales promise.

Jon C.