Known to young readers all over the world as creator of the Brownies, Palmer Cox was one of the most popular American writers for children in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A professional illustrator as well as a writer, he combined his talents to produce thirteen books about the Brownies, his own delightful adaptation of the traditional figures from folklore. He sketched them all with spindly legs, tapered feet, round paunches, and no necks, but in a variety of postures and garments and with highly individualized facial expressions. He told their lively adventures in lilting tetrameter rhymed couplets, fun to hear and easy to recite. He thus made them at once pictorially and verbally memorable to his youthful audience.

Cox, the son of Michael and Sarah Miller Cox, was born in Canada. During his childhood in Granby, a small community settled by Scotch immigrants, he...