Children's author Edith Thacher Hurd was born in Kansas City, Missouri on September 13, 1910. She married children's illustrator Clement Hurd in 1939 and they become one of children's literature's best-known teams. She wrote over seventy-five children's books, including Starfish, I Dance in My Red Pajamas and the Johnny Lion books, many of which were illustrated by her husband. In 1986, she wrote a memoir about the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and her husband entitled The World is Not Flat.
Children's book illustrator Clement Hurd was born on January 12, 1908. He studied architecture at Yale Univesity and painting in Paris with Fernand Leger. He illustrated Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, many of his wife Edith Hurd's books, and The World Is Round, which is the only children's book written by Gertrude Stein. He died on February 5, 1988.