About this item
Little Porcupines mother calls him the "light of her life," but its not until the night before Christmas, the very night of the Christmas play, that Little Porcupine sees the truth in her words.
About the Author
I was born in Hollidays Cove, West Virginia, near the Ohio River in the state's northern panhandle. The River, the east-west railroads that skirted the Allegheny mountains, the mountains themselves were our playground. I was born a writer, but my greatest influence was my sister Rose; she spent much of her short life in bed drawing on the back of wallpaper and binding her romantic stories into picture books. Art was a second love, but it was not stressed in grade and high school. After high school, I enlisted in the Marine Air Corps, and the GI Bill got me through the University of Washington, where I majored in journalism and worked as a stringer for The Seattle Times. While working as an editor in Tokyo, Japan, I began drawing and sent a portfolio to the Yale School of Art. At Yale, I sold my first short story to The New Yorker. Then on to Kenyon College, where I built an art department, taught painting, and began to write children's books. I have been hard at it ever since. Odd, I have never been interested in illustrating them myself. My wife Patricia and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in 2004.
