Whatever his subject matter and intended audience, however, Alexander manages to incorporate both practical and ethical lessons as well as historical information into his delightful tales.
Lloyd Chudley Alexander was born on 30 January 1924 to Alan Audley and Edna Chudley Alexander. He spent his youth in Philadelphia, where he attended the local public schools until the age of sixteen, when he graduated from Upper Darby Senior High School in 1940. A self-proclaimed bookworm since early childhood, his "best friends and dearest teachers" were the authors who first inspired his love of literature. Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo are a few of his favorites, and their influence, especially that of Dickens, is apparent in Alexander's works.
In a November 1968 article in Top of the News, "A Personal Note by Lloyd Alexander on Charles Dickens," he describes the impact Dickens's work had on him as a young boy. Reading Nicholas Nickleby, Alexander felt a bond with the book's unhappy schoolboy protagonist: "Charles Dickens somehow put my real one [world] into focus, showing me a way of seeing and feeling I had never known before." He was also fascinated by the stories of King Arthur and often played at being the legendary hero, fighting make-believe battles armed with a trash-can lid shield and a walking cane, borrowed from his rheumatic uncle, which his active imagination easily transformed into the sword Excalibur.
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