Folklore book series in reading order

by Kathryn Lasky

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.

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.

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).

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.

Rumer Godden

69 books

Rumer Godden was a British author with more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books to her name. Black Narcissus opened the catalogue in 1939 and reached the screen in 1947; The River followed in 1946 and was filmed in 1951; nine of Godden's works were adapted for film in all. India, nuns, family life and children's stories about dolls and mice, The Mousewife (1951), Mouse House (1952), Impunity Jane (1954), run through the work. Godden wrote a few books with her elder sister, the novelist Jon Godden, among them Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of a childhood spent in a part of India now inside Bangladesh. The catalogue holds 69 entries reaching 2012.

Jane Langton (1922–2018) wrote children's literature and mystery novels, and illustrated her own books. Two sequences carry most of the work: the Homer Kelly mysteries, built on a recurring detective of that name, and the Hall Family Chronicles, which run to magic and fairy tale. Thirty-four books are catalogued, from The Majesty of Grace (1961) to The Dragon Tree (2008), with Massachusetts and Cambridge among the settings, at a median length of 252 pages.

Susan Cooper, born on 23 May 1935, is an English children's author best known for The Dark Is Rising, a contemporary fantasy sequence set in England and Wales that draws on Arthurian legend and Welsh folk heroes. That work earned Cooper the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2012 for writing for teens, and in the 1970s the Welsh Books Council named two of its five novels best English-language book of the year with an authentic Welsh background. Catalogued titles include Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), Mandrake (1966), The Dark is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975) and The Shortest Day (2019). Boggart is another Cooper series.

P.L. Travers

17 books• 1 series

Mary Poppins made P.L. Travers' name. Travers (1899-1996), born Helen Lyndon Goff, was an Australian-British writer who spent most of her career in England. Mary Poppins (1934) opens a sequence continued by Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Poppins in the Park (1952) and Mary Poppins from A to Z (1962), and the magical nanny of the title is the character Travers is known for. Seventeen titles are catalogued through Aunt Sass: Christmas Stories (2014), among them I Go by Sea, I Go by Land (1941), The Fox at the Manger (1962) and Friend Monkey (1971). Travers grew up in the Australian bush at Maryborough, Queensland, went to boarding school in Sydney, published as a teenager, worked briefly as a Shakespearean actress, and took her pen name after moving to England at 24.

Alexander McCall Smith

165 books• 25 series

Sir Alexander McCall Smith, born 24 August 1948, is a Scottish legal scholar and novelist who created The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Born and raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), McCall Smith was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and worked on medical law and bioethics committees. English-language sales passed 40 million by 2010, with translations into 46 languages. The catalogue lists 165 books from White Hippo (1980) to 2026, including 44 Scotland Street, Isabel Dalhousie, Detective Varg and children's titles.

Philip Pullman

51 books• 10 series

Philip Pullman's catalogue covers fantasy and children's adventure, with detective stories, fairy tales and graphic novels alongside. His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust are the sequences it is built around, joined by the Sally Lockhart mysteries, the New Cut Gang, the Canongate Myths and The Adventures of John Blake. Sixty-five catalogued titles run from The Haunted Storm (1972) through The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) to The Rose Field in 2025.

Neil Gaiman

199 books• 41 series

Neil Gaiman, born Neil Richard Gaiman on 10 November 1960, is an English writer of short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre and screenplays. The Sandman comic series ran from 1989 to 1996, and the novels include Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005) and The Graveyard Book (2008). The Graveyard Book made Gaiman the first author to win both the Newbery and Carnegie medals for one work, and other awards include the Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker. Gaiman co-created the television adaptations of Good Omens and The Sandman. The catalogue runs from Duran Duran (1984) to The Silver Age (2024) and includes Sandman and Death graphic novels and children's books.

Jack London

156 books• 2 series

Jack London (January 12, 1876 to November 22, 1916), born John Griffith Chaney, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. London helped pioneer commercial fiction and the American magazine, and became one of the first American writers to win international celebrity and a large fortune from writing. A member of the radical San Francisco literary group "The Crowd", London campaigned for animal welfare, workers' rights and socialism. Those causes shaped The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel, and The People of the Abyss, a non-fiction exposé, as well as War of the Classes and Before Adam. The catalogue lists 156 titles from The Wisdom Of The Trail (1899), including The Son of the Wolf (1900) and Children of the Frost (1902).

Marguerite Henry (born Marguerite Breithaupt, 13 April 1902 to 26 November 1997) was an American children's author who wrote fifty-nine books drawn from true stories of horses and other animals. King of the Wind, a 1948 horse book, won Henry the Newbery Medal, and two other Henry books were runners-up. Misty of Chincoteague (1947), one of those runners-up, led to several related titles and the 1961 film Misty. The catalogue lists 34 Henry books from Birds at Home (1942) to Brown Sunshine of Sawdust Valley (1996), including Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945). Subjects include ponies, the Chincoteague pony and horse racing.

Andrew Clements

83 books• 10 series

Andrew Clements (May 29, 1949 to November 28, 2019) was an American children's author. Frindle, the first Clements novel, won an award decided by the votes of schoolchildren in about 20 U.S. states, and received the 2016 Phoenix Award, given to a book that missed a major prize on first publication. The catalogue lists 83 books from Bird Adalbert (1985) to The Frindle Files (2024). Schools, teachers, friendship and dogs recur in the subjects. The Clements series include Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School, Jake Drake, Pets to the Rescue and Real Monsters.