Authors and Books
for Children

Twin Tales: Lucy Fitch Perkins Etexts

A trained artist, book illustrator, and art teacher, Lucy Fitch Perkins is best remembered today for writing and illustrating the long-running Twins of the World series, published between 1911 and 1938.

Born in Maples, Indiana, on July 12, 1865, Perkins studied art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, worked as a book illustrator, and taught art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After her marriage to an architect in 1891, she moved to Illinois and had two children, and continued to illustrate other people's books.


When a publisher friend suggested that she write her own books, Perkins's interest in children from various lands--sparked by visits to Ellis Island, where immigrants arrived in the United States, and to a Chicago school filled with children of different nationalities--led her to write and illustrate what became the Twins of the World series.

Each volume of the series, beginning with The Dutch Twins, focuses on a pair of twins from a specific country and explains their cultural heritage and customs in the context of a story for children. Well received both popularly and critically, Perkins's twenty-six Twins of the World books sold more than two million copies.

The series is still fondly remembered today: for example, noted children's author Beverly Cleary has traced her love of reading to Perkins's Twins books, and historian Barbara Tuchman has credited them with giving her an early fascination with history.

Perkins died in Pasadena, California, on March 18, 1937; she had been working on The Dutch Twins and Little Brother, which was completed by her daughter and published as the last book in the Twins series in 1938.

A nice selection of Twins of the World books can be found on the Web, some of them with Perkins's original illustrations.

Twins of the World
#1 The Dutch Twins, 1911
#2 The Japanese Twins, 1912
#4 The Eskimo Twins, 1914
#7 The Belgian Twins, 1917
#8 The French Twins, 1918
#9 The Spartan Twins, 1918
#10 The Scotch Twins, 1919
#13 The Swiss Twins, 1922

Additional book on the Web by Lucy Fitch Perkins
Stories of the Pilgrims by Margaret B. Pumphrey, 1912 (illustrator)