Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt (1901–79) earned distinction for her pathfinding work in not one but two demanding creative arenas. As the author and illustrator of several of twentieth-century America’s most original children’s picture books, she brought rare imagination and a sublimely playful touch to an often placid and predictable genre, publishing dozens of titles including Brave Mr. Buckingham (1935), Lucky Mrs. Ticklefeather (1935), Once There Was A Little Boy (1946), as well as her most renowned classic Pat the Bunny (1940). The daughter of historian Frederick Hill Meserve, Kunhardt grew up amid his unrivalled collection of photographs of Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries; in time she became a Lincoln scholar and the co-author of Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1985).