Garth Williams

Something unsettling resides at the heart of the most beloved books for very young children—that is, the literature for illiterates. This note is a belated attempt to grapple with the horror of infinite regression as it manifests in certain of these works, and perhaps to sound the alarm for parent-caretaker voice-over providers who are too sleep-deprived to notice what’s actually going on.

In Margaret Wise Brown’s Little Fur Family, a small, hirsute child of indeterminate species spends a day in the woods. This gentle narrative of forest exploration appears completely anodyne.

Else Holmelund Minarik, a writer for children whose Little Bear picture-book series which simply, gently and evocatively tells the story of an anthropomorphized cubs forays into the wider world has been a mainstay of childhood for more than half a century, died on Thursday at her home in Sunset Beach, N.C. She was 91. The death was announced HarperCollins Publishers, her longtime publishing house. The first of many books by Ms. Minarik (pronounced MIN-uh-rick), Little Bear appeared in 1957 as the inaugural title in the I Can Read! series. Aimed at beginning readers, the series, now comprising hundreds of