My Father's Dragon

Ruth Stiles Gannett wrote My Father’s Dragon just a few years after her 1944 graduation from Vassar College. An immediate success, it was named a Newbery Honor Book, and was soon followed by two sequels, Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland. All three dragon stories have been continuously in print since their publication. In 2022, My Father’s Dragon premiered as an animated film on Netflix. Ruth Stiles Gannett died in 2024, at the age of one hundred.

Ruth Chrisman Gannett was already a well-established artist and illustrator when she began collaborating with her stepdaughter on My Father’s Dragon and its sequels. Her pictures for these books are perhaps her most enduring work. Her illustrations can also be seen in the first edition of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and in Miss Hickory by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey. Ruth Chrisman Gannett was married to Lewis Gannett, daily book critic for the New York Herald Tribune. She died in 1979.

Praise for My Father’s Dragon

“Here is a real delight—a nonsense tale in which the ingenuity of the humor and the logic of the nonsense are irresistible.”—The New Yorker

“The power of My Father’s Dragon lies in the author’s assurances that while the adults in our lives can set things right some of the time, children will also become strong and clever enough to take care of themselves, and, when the time comes, will rescue their own children.”—The Horn Book