#David Pallandini

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More Fairy Tales

This week I bring you The Girl Who Cried Flowers, and Other Tales, by the prolific American writer Jane Yolen (b.1939), illustrated by David Palladini (1946-2019), and published in New York by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1974. The book contains five original fairy tales with accompanying illustrations that range from one to two pages and are in both black and white and color. Tales such as these among her more than 300 titles has led Newsweek to dub Yolen “The Hans Christian Andersen of America.”

Yolen claims that it was this book, published nine years after her first book, that established her reputation in the field of children’s literature. The title story, The Girl Who Cried Flowers, has seen several iterations, including being separately published in Cricket magazine in 1990, published as an audiotape that Yolen narrated for Weston Woods Studios in their Readings to Remember series, and produced as an animated movie by Auryn Studios, with a script by Yolen, and directed by Bollywood director Umesh Shukla.

Yolen, who had originally worked as an editor, considered herself to be a poet and a journalist/nonfiction writer. Fate took her in a different direction, however, and to her surprise she became a children’s book writer who focused mostly on fantasy and science fiction. Her numerous awards andhonors include a Caldecott Medal, a Caldecott Honor, two Nebula awards, the Jewish Book Award, and six honorary doctorates.

Palladini, an Italian-born American illustrator, was best known for his Aquarian Tarot deck, which was published by Morgan Press in 1970 and reworked as the New Palladini Tarot in 1997 by U.S. Game Systems. Palladini’s style is reminiscent of the Art Nouveau illustrations of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley, a beautiful accompaniment to Jane Yolen’s stories.

View more posts from our Historical Curriculum Collection of children’s books.

View more Women’s History Month posts.

-- Elizabeth V., Special Collections Undergraduate Writing Intern