Edward Eager

Unable to find books he wanted to read aloud to his young son Fritz, Edward Eager set about writing them himself, taking E. Nesbit as his model and calling her the finest children's author of all. Born in Toledo in 1911, he studied at Harvard and made his living writing plays and song lyrics for theatre, radio and television. Half Magic came out in 1954 and grew into a run of seven titles, all illustrated by N. M. Bodecker. Knight's Castle, the second, sends its children into the world of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe by way of a toy castle, and took the Ohioana Book Award for juvenile literature in 1957. Seven-Day Magic closed the sequence in 1962: the children borrow a book from the library and find their own doings written down in it. Eager died in Stamford, Connecticut, on 23 October 1964, aged fifty-three.