Nordstrom felt that the original design of the series was dated and ill-suited for what she termed “forthright realistic frontier stories.”92 She reached out to a little-known British illustrator who had memorably rendered E. B. White’s dauntless mouse child, born of human parents, in Stuart Little, published in 1945. Garth Williams’s black-and-white drawings had captured a whimsical work of pure imagination, and he was at first hesitant to tackle Wilder’s books, which struck him as “very historical, very real.”93 But Nordstrom held firm, ordering him to “go home and read those books
...more
