Dahlov Ipcar's Wild Animal Alphabet
In a career spanning more than three-quarters of a century, Maine artist Dahlov Ipcar has written and illustrated more than thirty children's and young adult books, starting with The Little Fisherman (written by Margaret Wise Brown) in 1945 and including The Cat at Night, Hardscrabble Harvest, and My Wonderful Christmas Tree. Her unique and distinctively modern style helped change the role of artwork in children's literature. She was born in 1917 in Vermont and raised in New York City. Her parents, the famed sculptor William Zorach and artist Marguerite Zorach, bought a farm on Georgetown Island in 1923, where Ipcar first summered and later moved with her husband Adolph in 1937. She still lives on the farm and continues to paint almost every day. In 2010, she released her first new book in more than twenty years, Dahlov Ipcar's Farmyard Alphabet, a board book with original text and illustrations taken from eleven of her previously published books.