Book excerpt: For more than 450 years, children's literature has delighted, fascinated, and powerfully influenced readers and listeners of all ages. Now the groundbreaking Norton Anthology of Children's Literature invites readers to discover four centuries of literature for children. Beginning in 1659 and ending at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Norton Anthology includes the work of 170 authors and illustrators representing such familiar genres as fairy tales, picture books, nursery verse, and fantasy, as well as less familiar genres such as alphabets, chapbooks, and comics. More than 90 works are included in their entirety, from The New England Primer to Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses to the contemporary classic Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. Richly illustrated, the volume includes 45 images in full color and 375 in black and white and makes widely available for the first time facsimile images of works available only in rare-book libraries. Norton Anthology introductions, headnotes, annotations, and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the works.