Louise Fitzhugh herself, conceived of Harriet in 1963, in the wake of disappointment after a gallery showing of her artwork: that’s when she started work on a children’s book featuring “a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.” Leslie Brody did not grow up with Harriet she “met” her when she was commissioned to adapt the novel for the stage in 1988: “I read it through several times, stunned at how lucky I was-after all this time, and the many ways our rendezvous might have gone awry-to find her.” Decades have passed, but she remains relevant: readers continue to freshly fall for-and renew their acquaintance with-Harriet. In the five years following its publication in 1964, Harriet the Spy sold about 2.5 million copies that number nearly doubled by 2019. That’s how Louise Fitzhugh describes feeling in the mid-1970s-toward the end of her life, in a letter to a friend-in Sometimes You Have to Lie : The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy (2020), a biography by Leslie Brody.
It’s still so relevant-a writer with her mouth “open in horror all the time” at “the state of the world” and all the “social injustice, prejudice, and poverty” around her.
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