Laura F. Kready

Laura F. Kready approached folklore as material for teachers, storytellers, and students of children’s literature. Houghton Mifflin published A Study of Fairy Tales in 1916 with an introduction by educator Henry Suzzallo. Kready organizes the volume around the worth of wonder tales, principles for selecting them, the craft of telling them aloud, their history, major classes, and sources for further reading. Her purpose is practical and literary: she asks teachers to consider composition, child psychology, language development, and the audience’s imaginative life whenever they choose a story. The book also treats retelling, gesture, dramatization, and classroom use, then places familiar European tales within a wider historical survey. Bibliographic records give her fuller name as Laura Fry Kready, while the original title page uses Laura F. Kready and notes her bachelor’s degree. A Study of Fairy Tales remains a document of early twentieth-century pedagogy and a substantial guide to folklore in education.