The Dreaming Game Hardcover - 2004

by Philip B. Kunhardt

A loving and inspiring portrait of Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, an extraordinary woman who brought an intensity and originality to the life around her.

The Dreaming Game is Philip B. Kunhardt's tribute to his mother, a woman of rare vision and intellect. Dorothy Kunhardt is best known as the author of the runaway bestseller Pat the Bunny, a revolutionary children's book in its time. But she was also a respected Lincoln scholar and biographer, and an inveterate chronicler of life, which she experienced as meaningfully and deeply as possible. And until she died in 1979, Kunhardt recorded everything around her-her early loves, her feelings about marriage and family, her perceptions about the world-in highly charged letters to her lifelong friend Katherine Strauss.

These letters and a host of others, combined with her son's research and memories, provide entry for us into a unique life-one of privilege but also of awareness, of restrictions, and, at the same time, of a remarkable openness to life's possibilities. The Dreaming Game is an extremely moving tribute to a mother, wife, writer, and friend, who was not always easy to live with but whose originality and passion for living left their mark on those around her, and on children everywhere, and continue to serve as an inspiration for all of us.