English author Helen Beatrix Potter was a popular and prolific children's writer. Potter wrote and illustrated about 28 books, all with animals as characters. The most famous of her stories is The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), which Potter had originally written for the ailing son of her ex-governess. Its success inspired more books, including The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904), and The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908). Potter combined her understanding of children, her talents as an artist, and her interests as a naturalist to create books that have won audiences for more than a century. The original illustrations for all of her works are now featured in the Tate Galleries in London. Potter was born on July 28, 1866, and she was the child of a genteel upper-middle-class family. She spent a lonely and restricted childhood in London. This isolation was alleviated only by her summers painting and drawing in the countryside in Scotland and in her beloved Lake District of northwestern England. Returning to the Lake District as an adult, Potter bought several farms in Sawrey, where she became a sheep farmer. She willed more than 4,000 acres of her land to the National Trust upon her death on Dec. 22, 1943. David McPhail was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He attended Vesper George University from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School from 1963 to 1966. He has been an illustrator of children's books since 1967 and an author of children's books since 1971. He says he enjoys writing and illustrating as much as he did when he began.