Florence Parry Heide was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 27, 1919. She studied at Wilson College before transferring to the University of California at Los Angeles, where she received a B.A. in English. She worked in advertising and public relations in New York City before returning to Pittsburgh during World War II. She moved to Wisconsin with her husband after the war and started writing books at the age of 48. She wrote or co-wrote over 100 children's books including the Treehorn series, Princess Hyacinth: The Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated, and The One and Only Marigold. She also wrote under the pseudonyms Alex B. Allen and Jamie McDonald. Heide received numerous… awards and honors including having The Shrinking of Treehorn named by the New York Times as the Best Illustrated Children's Book of 1971 and winning the Jugendbuchpreis for the Best Children's Book of Germany in 1977; The Day of Ahmed's Secret received the Editors' Choice Award from Booklist in 1991, and Sami and the Time of the Troubles received the Editors' Choice Award from Booklist in 1992. She died on October 24, 2011 at the age of 92.
Jules Feiffer was born on January 26, 1929. While working as a cartoonist, his work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, The Nation, and The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in The Village Voice in 1986. His other awards include a George Polk Award for his cartoons; an Obie Award for the play Little Murders; an Oscar for the anti-military short subject animation, Munro; and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild of America and the National Cartoonist Society. He is currently focusing on writing and illustrating books for children and young adults including The Man in the Ceiling, A Room with a Zoo and Bark, George! He has been a… professor at the Yale School of Drama, Northwestern University, Dartmouth, and Stony Brook Southampton College. Feiffer has been honored with major retrospectives at the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and The School of Visual Arts.