“For Louise, exposure could have caused real trouble,” Brody writes. She was motivated in part by a bohemian, countercultural disgust with the book marketing game, but the political climate at the time was certainly another factor. Despite her book’s extraordinary success, Fitzhugh gave no interviews, did no readings at children’s bookstores, and generally refused to participate in Harper’s publicity campaign. As a lesbian writing children’s literature in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, she guarded her privacy by necessity. It turns out that Fitzhugh intimately knew the dangers of having your cover blown. Welsch, a little girl who enjoys a carefree life of snooping on her Manhattan neighbors and eating bland sandwiches until, one day, the jig is up, and the notebook she’s been writing her astute but cruel observations in is discovered by her classmates and friends. Published in 1964, Harriet the Spy followed the adventures of Harriet M. The lack of public information on Fitzhugh is a bit confounding, not least because her claim to fame is a novel about collecting as much information on people as possible. Wolf, a writer whose only other published book is a reading companion to Little House on the Prairie. Its author was the intriguingly named Virginia L. The other appeared in 1995 to little fanfare. Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie is the second biography we have of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of the beloved children’s novel Harriet the Spy.
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