August 27, 1884

Ever wonder who wrote the Dick and Jane books we all read at the start of our public schooling? Some of the first books (1940-1946) were written by May Hill Arbuthnot  (August 27, 1884 to October 2, 1969). It is possible these first readers included Spot and Puff, the pooch and puss, though I am not certain when these features were put in the Dick and Jane series.  Half the children in America started school with Dick and Jane.

Arbuthnot is credited with playing an important role in developing children's literature from stories designed to bang children on the head with moral values, to books which treated seriously the peculiar needs and imagination of a certain age group.

She also authored a major, (still), book on education, a textbook for adults, Children and Books. (1947).

Also she wrote and edited several books, including Time for Poetry (1951), which includes classics like Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat", and Vachel Lindsay's "The Mysterious Cat." 

We read that:

....Arbuthnot... married Charles Criswell Arbuthnot, a Western Reserve University economics professor, in 1932... [and] was ....a tireless, widely traveled lecturer and advocate for better children’s books, even after her retirement from the university [Westerm Reserve] in 1949. She established a prestigious international award, the annual Arbuthnot Prize for lifetime achievement in children’s literature. Upon her death, in a Cleveland nursing home in 1969, Scott, Foresman, her longtime publisher, established the Arbuthnot Honor Lecture (now funded by the American Library Association and Association for Library Service to Children), to be given each year by an author, artist, critic, librarian, historian or teacher of children's literature.

Since information on May Hill Arbuthnot is hard to come by, let me include this link to a nice write-up, the source in fact of most of our information.  And from this article we learn about her defense of the Grimm brothers. 

The popular folk tales gleaned from the German countryside by the Grimm brothers (first published in 1812) were harrowing, often quite violent stories originally told “by adults to adults in an age when using wits against brute force was often the only means of survival, and therefore admirable. . . . Not a pretty code, but a realistic one,” Arbuthnot would write in her groundbreaking 1947 work, Children and Books....[E]ven the most horrific of these tales, wrote Arbuthnot, “are predominantly constructive, not destructive, in their moral lessons. ‘The humble and good shall be exalted,’
...

She had written the above in defense of W. H. Auden, who had ranked the Brothers Grimm's collection “among the few indispensable, common-property books upon which Western Culture can be founded” and “next to the Bible in importance. .

And here is a picture of our subject, no, not a cat but-----