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Spyri, Johanna

(Encyclopedia)Spyri, Johanna yōhänˈä shpēˈrē [key], 1827–1901, Swiss author. Her many stories of child life in Switzerland include Heidi (1880; tr. 1884), a classic among children's books. Heidi, the story...

daisy

(Encyclopedia)daisy [O.E.,=day's eye], name for several common wildflowers of the family Asteraceae (aster family). The daisy of literature, the true daisy, is Bellis perennis, called in the United States English d...

Greenaway, Kate

(Encyclopedia)Greenaway, Kate, 1846–1901, English illustrator and watercolorist. She is famous for her fanciful, humorous, delicately colored drawings of child life. She influenced children's clothing and the ill...

cruelty, prevention of

(Encyclopedia)cruelty, prevention of. In the 19th cent. many laws were passed in Great Britain and the United States to protect the helpless, especially children, lunatics, and domestic animals, from willful and ma...

Jelinek, Elfriede

(Encyclopedia)Jelinek, Elfriede yĕlˈĭnĕk [key], 1946–, Austrian novelist and playwright, b. Mürzzuschlag. A trained musician who also studied art history and theater, she began her literary career with the p...

Comenius, John Amos

(Encyclopedia)Comenius, John Amos kōmēˈnēəs [key], Czech Jan Amos Komenský, 1592–1670, Moravian churchman and educator, last bishop of the Moravian Church. Comenius advocated relating education to everyday ...

Keats, Ezra Jack

(Encyclopedia)Keats, Ezra Jack, 1916–83, American author and illustrator of children's books, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., as Jacob Ezra Katz. During the Great Depression, he painted murals for the Works Progress Administr...

La Fontaine, Jean de

(Encyclopedia)La Fontaine, Jean de zhäN də [key], 1621–95, French poet, whose celebrated fables place him among the masters of world literature. He was born at Château-Thierry to a bourgeois family. A restless...

Persian literature

(Encyclopedia)Persian literature, literary writings in the Persian language, nearly all of it written in the area traditionally known as Persia, now Iran. The 15th cent. period of the second Turko-Tartar invasi...

Lindgren, Astrid

(Encyclopedia)Lindgren, Astrid, 1907–2002, Swedish author of children's fiction, b. Astrid Anna Emilia Ericsson. She worked as a secretary before turning to writing as a profession and later was a children's book...
 

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