The d'Aulaires' career as collaborative author-illustrators of children's picture books spans over forty years, and for most of this time their critical reception and continuing sales have ensured them canonic stature, confirmed by the awarding of the Caldecott Medal in 1940 for Abraham Lincoln and by the number of their earlier books still in print. Seen as innovative and dramatic in the 1930s, their combination of color lithography with a conscious primitivism of style now appears backward-rather than forward-looking, though undeniable power remains, some of it deriving from the d'Aulaires' preference for heroic or mythic subjects treated in the rough-hewn manner that characterized their verbal as well as visual craft.

The cross-national background of the d'Aulaire marriage and their cosmopolitan early lives illuminate many of the distinctive features of their work. Ingri Maartenson was born in Norway (her uncle had translated the Icelandic Edda into Norwegian) and, determined to...