Robert Lawson

Writer and illustrator Robert Lawsons role in defining the style of childrens literature at mid-twentieth century was pivotal. Lawsons illustrations capture character and quirks with great humor and expressiveness; his prose reflects solid American values of liberty, courage, and hard work and inventively combines elements of history, fantasy, realism, and autobiography. This work inspects the autobiographical works, in which Lawson used personal reminiscence and picture-book format to tell the story of his own family; historical fantasies, a genre Lawson created by using as story narrator the imagined pets of figures like Ben Franklin and Paul Revere; the renowned Rabbit Hill volumes, incorporating realism, fantasy, and autobiography and advocating tolerance; and the whimsical nonsense tales, in which Lawson merged the realistic and the fantastical to create priceless works of entertainment. 01