Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt

Celebrating one of the most dynamic forces in American children’s literature, Dorothy Kunhardt’s Collected Works is the first survey of the life and work of this beloved author. Best known for Pat the Bunny (1940), Kunhardt was a tireless innovator, publishing more than 40 books in three decades. Today, Pat the Bunny is still in print and has sold nearly ten million copies.

Kunhardt dictated her first story to her father at the age of three, and went on to become an inventive author, illustrator and creator of children’s books. Her first stab at writing and illustrating was the outlandish devil-may-care picture book Junket Is Nice, featuring a little boy who imagined he had more sense than the rest of the world combined. Published in 1933, Junket received rave reviews, gave Depression-era families the perfect excuse to share a good laugh, and was an immediate bestseller. Many books followed, all notable for their originality in concept, format and design—among them Pat the Bunny, The Telephone Book (1942) and Tiny Animal Stories (1948)—and bearing the mark of their author’s unfettered imagination and seemingly boundless zest for living.

Drawn entirely from the Kunhardt family collection, this publication brings Dorothy Kunhardt’s work to life through photographs, letters, poetry, drawings, book mock-ups, unpublished manuscripts, as well as reproductions of first-edition books. Also shown are research materials and papers on Kunhardt’s second consequential career, as an Abraham Lincoln scholar and steward of the Meserve Collection of Lincoln photographs and artifacts begun by her father.