Ruth Krauss was born on July 25, 1901 in Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, she enjoyed reading, writing, and drawing, and her parents allowed her to quit school after the eighth grade to study art and the violin. Eventually she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Parsons School of Fine and Applied Art and studied anthropology at Columbia University. In 1941, she married David Johnson Leisk, who wrote and illustrated children's books as Crockett Johnson. They occasionally worked together. In the 1940's, Krauss was a member of the experimental Writer's Laboratory at the Bank Street School in New York City. She is credited as being one of the first author's to use the words and ideas of… children in her works. The Carrot Seed and I Can Fly won Spring Book Festival honor citations. Later in life, Krauss wrote adult poetry, which included theatrical poems, many of which were performed in New York, New Haven, and Boston. She died on July 10, 1993 in Westport, Connecticut.
Marc Simont was born in 1915 in Paris. His parents were from the Catalonia region of Spain, and his childhood was spent in France, Spain, and the United States. Encouraged by his father, Joseph Simont, an artist and staff illustrator for the magazine L'Illustration, Simont drew from a young age. He eventually attended art school in Paris, at the Acadmie Julian, Acadmie Ranson, and the Andr Lhote School, and in New York, at the New York National Academy of Design. He also spent three years in the army. When he was nineteen, Simont settled in America permanently, determined to support himself as an artist. His first illustrations for a children's book appeared in 1939. Since then, Simont has… illustrated nearly a hundred books. He won a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for illustrating Ruth Krauss's The Happy Day, and in in 1957 he was awarded the Caldecott Medal for his pictures in A Tree is Nice, by Janice May Udry. Simont's art is in collections as far afield at the Kijo Picture Book Museum in Japan. His most prized acknowledgement is having been chosen as the 1997 Illustrator of the Year in his native Catalonia by the Professional Association of Illustrators. Simont's book, The Stray Dog, won the Caldecott Medal in 2002.