Harriet is the best of them, if I remember correctly, but perhaps the others are worth a second look. Long live Louise Fitzhugh’s books! By the way, she also wrote two sequels to Harriet the Spy, The Long Secret and Sport. She points out that Fitzhugh and Betty Friedan were writing breakthrough books the same year. … When Harriet says, “I’ll be damned if I’ll go to dancing school,” she sends up a howl as staggering – in its way – as Allen Ginsberg’s poem by the same name.īrody, a witty, compassionate writer, places Fitzhugh’s life and quirky work in the context of her times.

Some children’s books critics simply couldn’t get over how “nasty” they thought she was, and what “a horrid example” she set. And so I was astonished to learn that some reviewers disliked it when it was published in 1964. I have always understood that Harriet the Spy is a classic, frequently compared to The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. Louise Fitzhugh and photographer Gina Jackson, about 1952. So I turned to writing.” And Jonathan Franzen wrote a blurb on the cover of the anniversary edition (see picture at top of page). “Of course, I ate tomato sandwiches and wanted to be a spy. Mystery writer Cara Black also read Harriet. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, a book about a reading one book a day for a year, Nina Sankovitch mentions that she so identified with Harriet that she insisted on carrying a notebook and a flashlight. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have cited it as a major influence. I read Harriet several times as a child – probably the last time was in seventh grade. The author paints Fitzhugh as compassionate but someone who didn’t suffer fools, and who worked almost constantly, even though her initial creative output leaned more toward painting than. And when her writing got her into trouble, we empathized. You didn’t wonder why the gear: it seemed natural, especially for Harriet, an aspiring writer who spied on people and took notes. The cover art was irresistible: a bespectacled girl in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans strolls through a run-down New York neighborhood carrying a notebook, with a flashlight hooked to her belt. If you were a girl in the 1960’s, you were nine or ten when you read Harriet the Spy.

Louise fitzhugh paintings