Robert McCloskey, author and illustrator of children's books, was born in Hamilton, Ohio, where his first commission, a much admired bas-relief on the municipal building, still stands, where the children's section of the library is called the Robert McCloskey room, and where the citizens still turn out for a Robert McCloskey Day when he returns for a visit. And well they should, for McCloskey has become a kind of literary Pied Piper from Hamilton, instead of Hamelin, almost as fascinating as his mythical counterpart for his young audiences in America and in the many foreign countries where his books have been published in translation. The journey on which McCloskey takes children, however, is to an imaginative world that is reassuring and comfortable, usually comic if not wildly humorous, sometimes exciting but never really dangerous. Even mildly threatening situations, if such occur, are very temporary. A first-rate illustrator, in...