Her new heroine is a beautiful red crawler tractor of many talents… Spirited, imaginative, and even somewhat informative about how city highway departments work.”) “The Little House” is about a thoughtful pastoral cottage that weathers many years, wondering about life in the city, until eventually a city grows around her. ( The New Yorker wrote, of “Katy and the Big Snow,” “Another unusual picture book by this author artist, who is adept at personifying machines. Much of Burton’s work concerned nature and the passing of time, with subthemes of industrialization and urbanization. “Children are very frank critics,” she said. After the failure of her first book submission, about a piece of dust, she learned to test the stories on her own children first. When she wrote books, she designed them in their entirety, from the typeface to the illustrations to the layout. There, in Cape Ann, Burton founded a textile collective, Folly Cove Designers. She married the artist George Demetrios, and they moved to Gloucester and raised a family. She attended art school in San Francisco, then moved to Boston. Virginia Lee Burton grew up in Massachusetts and California her mother was a poet and an artist, and her father was an engineer and a dean at M.I.T. Much of it depicts the world of a century or half-century ago, but compared with the Mesozoic it’s quite familiar.

For children, “Life Story” is one of the first works of art or science that will attempt to explain natural history, contextualizing the dinosaurs, those megastars of kid-dom, in time and place among the stars and on the planet, and it does so with a humanizing artistic realism the final section, fittingly and comfortingly, zooms in on life as we recognize it. “Life Story,” a Wagnerian opera of a book with a Hansel and Gretel aesthetic, is not as famous, somehow, as “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” or “The Little House.” It can be maddeningly hard to find at average bookstores, but good ones have it and loyal fans value it. In 1962, Virginia Lee Burton, the Gloucester, Massachusetts, writer and illustrator of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” “Katy and the Big Snow,” and the Caldecott Award-winning “The Little House,” among others, published her final picture book, “Life Story,” a hardy, quiet work of genius that starts with the birth of the sun, proceeds through fires and ferns and glaciers, and ends with you, the reader, living your life in the present day.

The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton