Folklore book series in reading order

by Albert Payson Terhune

by Steven Kellogg

by Kathryn Lasky

by Eve Bunting

Geraldine McCaughrean

155 books• 14 series

Geraldine McCaughrean, born 6 June 1951, is a British children's novelist with more than 170 books to that name. Peter Pan in Scarlet (2004) is the official sequel to Peter Pan, commissioned by Great Ormond Street Hospital. McCaughrean has won the Carnegie Medal twice and the Michael L. Printz Award. Myths, legends, folklore and Bible stories appear among the subjects, and series include Myths and Legends of the World, Roman Myths and Brambledown Tales. The catalogue holds 155 books from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (1982) to Under a Fire-Red Sky (2025).

Alvin Schwartz (1927-1992) was an American author and journalist who wrote more than fifty books on folklore and word play, many of them for young readers. Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark is the series recorded here, and it also carries a character entry. Word-play and folklore titles in the catalogue include A Twister of Twists, A Tangler of Tongues (1972), Witcracks: Jokes and Jests from American Folklore (1973), Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat (1974), Tomfoolery: Trickery and Foolery with Words (1975) and Whoppers: Tall Tales and Other Lies (1975), beside practical guides such as Going Camping (1972) and Hobbies (1972). Subjects cover folklore, tales, riddles, horror stories, wit and humor, and juvenile literature.

Steven Kellogg is an American author and illustrator of children's books, born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1941. The catalogue lists 94 titles, including the Pinkerton books, the Jimmy's Boa series and A Tall Tale, at a median 32 pages each. Animals, friendship, folklore, dogs and fairy tales supply the recurring subjects. The University of Findlay in Ohio gave Kellogg an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2011, and his original illustrations went to the Mazza Museum there.

Ashley Bryan

26 books• 1 series

Ashley Frederick Bryan (1923-2022) wrote and illustrated children's books, drawing subjects largely from the African-American experience. Bryan was a United States nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006 and took the Children's Literature Legacy Award in 2009. The picture book Freedom Over Me reached the 2016 Kirkus Prize shortlist and earned a Newbery Honor. The catalogue holds 26 titles, from The Ox of the Wonderful Horns and Other African Folktales (1971) to Infinite Hope (2019), among them The Dancing Granny (1977), Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (1980) and The Cat's Purr (1985). Folklore, African tales, legends, Anansi and spirituals run through the subjects.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

75 books• 4 series

Kevin Crossley-Holland, born 7 February 1941, is an English poet, translator and author for children. The Arthur trilogy (2000–2003) won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Storm, a 1985 novella, received the Carnegie Medal and in 2007, the medal's 70th anniversary, was named among the ten top winners. The catalogue lists 75 books from Havelok The Dane (1964) to Red the River Rises (2026), with King Horn: A Medieval Romance (1966), The Green Children (1968) and The Rain-Giver: Poems (1972) among them. Folklore, tales, poetry and the Middle Ages appear in the subjects.

Julius Lester

48 books• 2 series

To Be a Slave (1968) opens the catalogue of Julius Lester, an American writer for both children and adults who was also a civil rights activist, a photographer and a musician with two recorded albums of folk music and original songs. Lester taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. The 48 listed titles run to The Girl Who Saved Yesterday (2016) and return to African American history, slavery, folktales and race relations. Lester lived from 1939 to 2018.

Zora Neale Hurston

50 books• 1 series

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 to January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist and documentary filmmaker. Hurston depicted racial struggle in the early 20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the most popular of the four novels. Hurston also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, the autobiography, ethnographies and essays. Catalogued titles include Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), among 50 books.

Michael Morpurgo

171 books• 5 series

Sir Michael Morpurgo, born 5 October 1943, is an English author, poet, playwright and librettist best known for children's novels such as War Horse (1982). Morpurgo served as the third Children's Laureate from 2003 to 2005 and is President of BookTrust, a children's reading charity. Recurring themes include outsiders who triumph, survival and bonds with nature, set in places such as the Cornish coast and the First World War trenches. The catalogue holds 171 books from It Never Rained (1974) to Down Burrow Lane (2026), including the Mudpuddle Farm series.

Albert Payson Terhune

59 books• 2 series

Albert Payson Terhune (1872-1942) was an American writer, journalist and dog breeder. Terhune bred collies at his Sunnybank Kennels, whose bloodlines persist in today's rough collies, and wrote the collie stories that made him popular, above all the Lad, a Dog books. The 59 catalogued titles stretch from Syria from the Saddle (1896) to a 1998 reissue, peaking in the 1920s, and cover dogs, folklore, legends and short fiction.

Virginia Hamilton (March 12, 1936 to February 19, 2002) was an American children's author who wrote 41 books. M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1975 Newbery Medal. Hamilton's work explores the African-American experience, which Hamilton termed "Liberation Literature". Further honours were the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1995. The catalogue lists 44 entries from Zeely (1967) to Liberation Literature (2024), including The House of Dies Drear (1968), The Planet of Junior Brown (1971) and Justice and Her Brothers (1978).

Mary Pope Osborne

166 books• 9 series

Mary Pope Osborne, born May 20, 1949, is an American children's author and audiobook narrator best known for the Magic Tree House series, which had sold more than 134 million copies worldwide by 2017. Awards have gone to both the series and Osborne, including recognition for work promoting children's literacy. Osborne attended the University of North Carolina and published a first book in 1982. The catalogue counts 166 Osborne books, from Run, Run, As Fast As You Can (1982) to Sea Otter Sunrise (2025). Time travel, tree houses, history, folklore and Greek mythology appear among the subjects.

Alan Garner

30 books• 3 series

Alan Garner, born 1934, writes children's fantasy and retellings of traditional British folk tales. Cheshire supplies the ground for most of it: Garner was born in Congleton, grew up in Alderley Edge, and set much of the work in that landscape, using the local dialect. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) opens the catalogue and the Tales of Alderley, with The Moon of Gomrath (1963), Elidor (1965) and The Owl Service (1967) after it, and the Stone Book Quartet starting in 1976. 30 titles are catalogued, the last of them Treacle Walker (2021).

Gail Carson Levine

29 books• 3 series

Gail Carson Levine, born in 1947, writes fantasy for children and young adults out of fairy tale material. Ella Enchanted (1997) is the first novel and took a Newbery Honor in 1998. The Princess Tales retell familiar stories in short books - The Fairy's Mistake, The Princess Test, Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep and Cinderellis and the Glass Hill - and A Tale of Two Castles is a later series. Princesses, fairies, dragons and folklore recur across 29 titles, the newest being The Unusuals (2026).

N. Scott Momaday

31 books• 2 series

Navarre Scott Momaday was a Kiowa and American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist, born February 27, 1934 and dead on January 24, 2024. The novel House Made of Dawn took the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is held to be the first major work of the Native American Renaissance; Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote on Momaday's death that the book moved between oral storytelling and the written English novel. The catalogue holds 31 titles, from The Journey of Tai-me (1967) to Dream Drawings (2022), taking in The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Colors of Night (1976) and The Gourd Dancer (1976). Kiowa people, Indigenous peoples of North America, folklore and poetry lead the subjects.

Eric Carle

165 books• 6 series

Eric Carle (25 June 1929 to 23 May 2021) was an American author, designer and illustrator of children's books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a picture book first published in 1969, has sold more than 55 million copies in over 70 languages. Carle illustrated more than 70 children's books and wrote most of them, and sales across the Carle books exceed 170 million copies. Catalogued titles begin with 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo (1968), followed by The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), Pancakes, Pancakes! (1970), The Tiny Seed (1970) and Do You Want to Be My Friend? (1971). Subjects include board books, counting, color, animals and caterpillars.

Jane Yolen

237 books• 22 series

Jane Yolen (Jane Hyatt Yolen, February 11, 1939 to June 11, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction and children's books. The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella, is the best-known Yolen work, and Owl Moon and The Emperor and the Kite are among the others. The short works Sister Emily's Lightship and Lost Girls both won Nebula Awards. The catalogue counts 237 books from The Witch Who Wasn't (1964) to Daddy Plays a Mean Guitar (2026). Series include Commander Toad, How Do Dinosaurs...?, Pit Dragons, the Young Merlin Trilogy, Books of the Great Alta and Tartan Magic. Yolen worked as an editor, collaborated most often with Adam Stemple, and in 2012 became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

Guardians of Ga'Hoole is one of the series by Kathryn Lasky, an American children's writer born June 24, 1944, who writes for adults as Kathryn Lasky Knight and E. L. Swann. Lasky's children's work also includes Dear America and The Royal Diaries books, Wolves of the Beyond, Sugaring Time and The Night Journey, and honours include a Newbery Honor, the National Jewish Book Award and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature. The catalogue holds 159 books from I Have Four Names for My Grandfather (1976) to Sacred Light (2026), including Tugboats Never Sleep (1977), The Weaver's Gift (1980) and Beyond the Divide (1983). Horses Of The Dawn, Bears Of The Ice and Camp Princess are further series, and subjects name owls, wolves, diaries and Jews.

Thornton W. Burgess

72 books• 5 series

Thornton W. Burgess (1874-1965) was an American conservationist and author of children's stories who wrote more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for a daily newspaper column. The animal tales are the surviving work: Lightfoot the Deer (1906), Mother West Wind's Animal Friends (1912), The Adventures of Reddy Fox (1913), The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat (1914), The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver (1914) and The Adventures of Peter Cottontail (1914). Forest animals, birds, rabbits, mice, friendship and folklore fill them. Seventy-two titles are catalogued, gathered into the Bedtime Story Books, Old Mother West Wind and Smiling Pool series, at a median 96 pages.

Cynthia Rylant, born Cynthia Smith on June 6, 1954, is an American author and librarian who has written more than 100 children's books across picture books, short stories, novels, nonfiction and poetry. Missing May took the 1993 Newbery Medal, A Fine White Dust was a 1987 Newbery Honor book, and two further titles are Caldecott Honor Books. The catalogue records 229 books from When I Was Young in the Mountains (1982) onward, with series including Henry and Mudge, Mr. Putter & Tabby, Poppleton and the Lighthouse Family.

Anthony Horowitz

106 books• 23 series

Anthony Horowitz is an English novelist and screenwriter, born 5 April 1955, who specialises in mystery and suspense. For children and young adults Horowitz created Alex Rider, a 14-year-old British boy who spies for MI6, along with The Power of Five (titled The Gatekeepers in the US) and The Diamond Brothers. The catalogue holds 106 Horowitz books from Enter Frederick K. Bower (1978) to A Deadly Episode (2026). Other listed series include Detective Daniel Hawthorne, Susan Ryeland, Groosham Grange and the Pentagram Chronicles. Horowitz is still publishing.

Isaac Asimov

553 books• 31 series

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer who also taught biochemistry at Boston University. Hard science fiction is the core of Asimov's reputation, and the Foundation series about a fallen space empire is the most famous work; Asimov ranked with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the "Big Three" of the genre. The output also covers mysteries, fantasy and popular science, with non-fiction lines such as How Did We Find Out and the Library of the Universe. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books. This catalogue opens with the story Marooned Off Vesta (1939) and names Asimov on 400 of the listed books.

Beatrix Potter

30 books

Beatrix Potter wrote small books about animals for children. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) is the earliest of the catalogued tales, followed by The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904) and The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905). Thirty-one titles are catalogued in all, most of them from the 1900s, and they run short at a median 64 pages.

Enid Blyton

957 books• 42 series

Enid Blyton (11 August 1897 to 28 November 1968) was an English children's writer and one of the best-selling authors of children's literature, with more than 600 million copies sold and translations into ninety languages. Blyton wrote on education, natural history, fantasy, mystery and biblical stories. Noddy, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Five Find-Outers and Malory Towers are the best-remembered Blyton books, and St Clare's, Mary Mouse and Toyland Stories are also listed. The catalogue opens with The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies (1924), and The Naughtiest Girl in the School (1930) and The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (1937) follow. Titles dated after Blyton's death also appear, up to Stories of Wonders and Wishes (2023).

Robin McKinley, born November 16, 1952, is an American author of fantasy novels and fairy tale retellings. The Hero and the Crown (1984) won the Newbery Medal, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named McKinley the 39th Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master in 2022. The catalogue lists 21 books from Beauty (1978) to Shadows (2013), including The Blue Sword (1982), The Outlaws of Sherwood (1988) and Deerskin (1993). Series include Damar, Folktales and Tales Of Elemental Spirits.