Natalie Babbitt
1 book analyzed
Biography
Natalie Babbitt (1932-2016) spent her career writing children's books that refused to condescend to their readers. She was both the author and original illustrator of her books, a combination that gave her work an unusual unity of vision. She wrote Tuck Everlasting in 1975, during a period when American children's literature was beginning to take seriously the idea that children could handle — and needed — stories about death, loss, and moral complexity. Babbitt herself has said that the novel grew from her own anxiety about death and her conviction that immortality, however appealing it sounds, would actually be a kind of imprisonment. She was married for over fifty years and, like Tuck, seems to have concluded that a life fully lived and then relinquished is worth more than an existence that continues indefinitely.