Looking for fun facts about children’s authors and kid lit? You’ve come to the right place! In this post, I’ve compiled 40 book trivia facts about authors of children’s literature. A sampling of trivia about 40 influential and classic children’s literature authors, this post builds on my children’s literature trivia quiz post that I did last year:
After seeing how popular my children’s literature trivia quiz post did, I knew I wanted to return to book trivia for kids one day. This list of interesting facts about children’s authors and children’s books was super fun to put together.
So what are you waiting for? Dive into this list of fun facts about books for kids.
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Fun Book Trivia for Kids
#1: Dr. Seuss’s all-time bestselling book Green Eggs and Ham (1960) was sparked by a bet with Suess’s publisher that the writer-illustrator couldn’t write a book with 50 or fewer words.
#2: We all know “Willy Wonka” from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), but Dahl took inspiration from the name of a real man, a postman, from Nebraska who wrote to Dahl in 1971.
#3: Beverly Cleary’s famous character Ramona of Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981), was created by accident. Cleary realized while writing her Henry Huggins (1950) books that Beatrice Ann “Beezus” Quimby needed a younger sister.
#4: The authors of the Berenstain Bears series share their last name with their characters. Husband-wife team Jan and Stan wrote the books in the 1960s, and today their son, Mike, has taken over.
#5: The main characters in Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants stories were named after two children’s book heroes. Harold is named after the protagonist of Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) and George is taken from the H. A. Rey’s Curious George books.
#6: Monster (1999) author Walter Dean Myers was inspired to write creatively about his experience growing up in Harlem when he read James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues.
#7: The real-life inspiration for the Pete the Cat books was a black kitten that illustrator James Dean adopted from an animal shelter in 1999.
#8: J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, does not have a middle name. Joanne Rowling included “K” for Kathleen after her grandmother.
#9: Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) almost didn’t have that name. Originally, Sendak wanted the title to be Where the Wild Horses Are before he changed his mind and went with “Things” to describe the wild creatures Max meets. I named this one of my most influential books in my childhood on who I became as a kid lit writer.
#10: Native author Louise Erdrich, writer of The Birchbark House series, was part of the cohort of the first female students at the Ivy League’s Dartmouth College. That same year, the college started a Native-American studies department. Later, after receiving her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence.
#11: Want to know a fun fact about a classic picture book? Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962) won the 1963 Caldecott Medal, which marked a significant milestone: The Snowy Day was the first book featuring a Black character to win a major children’s literary award.
#12: E.B. White’s inspiration for Charlotte’s Web (1952) came from witnessing a spider spin an egg sac in his barn in Maine.
#13: Kate DiCamillo is one of only six author to win two Newbery Medals: for The Tale of Desperaux (2003) and Flora & Ulysses (2013).
#14: Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover (2015) took five years from idea to publication. The novel-in-verse received 22 rejections before Alexander sold the novel. Later, The Crossover met with critical and commercial success and won the 2015 Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award Honor.
#15: Judy Blume’s most prolific decade of writing was the 1970s. Over the course of those years, Blume published 13 books, including her classics Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972).
#16: Katherine Patterson’s Jip, His Story (1996) was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1893).
#17: Captain Hook was not the original villain in J.M. Barrie’s drama that would later be adapted into the novel Peter Pan (1911) the play that inspired the novel. Hook was only invented to solve a theatrical need: the stage hands needed more time to switch out the sets, so Barrie created an interstitial scene featuring a pirate ship. The original villain? According to Barrie, it was Peter Pan himself!
#18: Author Jacqueline Woodson has most of her books memorized so she carries her books with her, like Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) and Pecan Pie Baby (2010), wherever she goes.
#19: Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947) was banned by the New York Public Library in 1947 for being “overly sentimental.” It was reinstated in 1972.
#20: Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1901) was initially self-published with black-and-white illustrations. In 1902, the publisher Frederick Warne & Co republished the book having asked Potter to re-do the illustrations in color. It worked! By the end of Peter Rabbit‘s first year, it needed to be reprinted six times!
#21: Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings (1941) is the official children’s book for Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and bronze statues commemorating the mother duck and her babies can be found in Boston’s Public Garden.
#22: When Grace Lin was first conceptualizing her Lin and Ting early reader books, she originally considered writing about triplets.
#23: One of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) author A.A. Milne’s childhood teachers was none other than sci-fi writer H.G. Wells. At the time, Wells was still a mathematics teacher and not yet the published writer he became. It’s possible he influenced Milne’s passion for the subject, which he later studied at Cambridge University.
#24: Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic (1981) achieved the monumental honor of being the first children’s book to reach the prestigious New York Times bestseller list. A Light in the Attic stayed on the list for 182 weeks, breaking a hardcover book record.
#25: In writing Esperanza Rising (2000), Pam Muñoz Ryan, drew inspiration from her grandmother’s story of immigration from Mexico to California. Muñoz Ryan is the oldest of 23 grandchildren.
#26: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) was inspired in part by the story “The New Mother” by Victorian author Lucy Clifford. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark writer Alvin Schwartz renamed Clifford’s story as “The Drum” and adapted it for his creepy horror story collections.
#27: Susan Cooper, author of the fantasy series The Dark Is Rising, studied English at Oxford University. Cooper was a student while J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were professors there, and Cooper attended a lecture on Anglo-Saxon in which Tolkien shouted the opening lines of the great epic Beowulf.
#28: For 2015-2016, American Born Chinese (2006) author Gene Luen Yang was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. Notably, Yang was the first graphic novelist to receive the honor.
#29: Prolific author Christopher Paul Curtis’s first career was in an auto factory. His first book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 (1995) was written when he was 42 years old.
#30: Lois Lowry was offered the chance to make a cameo in the film adaptation of her book The Giver (1993), but she turned it down.
#31: Rita Williams-Garcia, author of the Gaither Sisters trilogy, started her author career early. By the age of 12, she sent short stories to magazines. She sold her first one to Highlights Magazine when she was 14.
#32: Eoin Colfer of Artemis Fowl (2001) fame also wrote the sixth book in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series at the request of Adams’s wife. The book is called And Another Thing… (2010).
#33: In an earlier draft of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), the character was a worm. Carle changed it to a caterpillar after feedback from his editor.
#34: Lewis Carroll cast himself in Alice in Wonderland. His part? The dodo.
#35: Katherine Applegate first heard of the real-life inspiration for Ivan, the gorilla hero of The One and Only Ivan (2012), in a magazine article. She visited him at his rescue home of Zoo Atlanta, though Ivan did not come out that day.
#36: In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, human characters have “daemon” animal companions. Pullman has said that his daemon would be a magpie.
#37: One of Mo Willems’s early jobs—before the fame that would come with Elephant and Piggie books—was writing and animating for Sesame Street.
#38: The Baby-Sitter’s Club series characters Kristy and Mary Anne were based on author Ann M. Martin (Mary Anne) and her childhood best friend, Beth (Kristy).
#39: R.L. Stine got his idea for the title of his bestselling Goosebumps series while reading a TV Guide magazine advertisement that said “It’s Goosebumps Week on channel 11.”
#40: Author Rachel Renée Russell is also a practicing attorney when she’s not penning her hilarious Dork Diaries series.
