Ruth Krauss, an outstanding and prolific writer of children's stories, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1911, the daughter of Julius and Blanche Rosenfeld Krauss. She was educated in public elementary schools and graduated from the Parsons School of Fine and Applied Art in New York City. She has also attended the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore where she studied art and music; she plays both the violin and the piano. She has participated in poetry workshops at the New School of Social Research in New York and has taken classes at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. Krauss has also studied anthropology at Columbia University, though she has noted that much of her writing "is tied in with the graphic arts." Krauss has undergone psychoanalysis and attended group and individual therapy sessions, which together with her study of art, music, and anthropology have helped to make...