Children's author Edith Thacher Hurd was born in Kansas City, Missouri on September 13, 1910. She married children's illustrator Clement Hurd in 1939 and they become one of children's literature's best-known teams. She wrote over seventy-five children's books, including Starfish, I Dance in My Red Pajamas and the Johnny Lion books, many of which were illustrated by her husband. In 1986, she wrote a memoir about the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and her husband entitled The World is Not Flat.