Mary Mapes DodgeAmerican children's author and editor Mary Mapes Dodge (January 26, 1831 – August 21, 1905) is well known for her novel Hans Brinker. For almost a third of the nineteenth century, she was an acknowledged innovator in the field of young adult fiction.Dodge worked for more than thirty years on St. Nicholas Magazine, which in the second half of the nineteenth century had a circulation of approximately 70,000 copies and was one of the most popular children's periodicals. She has the ability to suggest, create, and solicit contributions from only the people she wanted to write about. Numerous well-known writers agreed to contribute to her children's magazine, including Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Bret Harte, John Hay, Charles Dudley Warner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and dozens more. Rudyard Kipling once told her a tale about the Indian jungle, and Dodge requested that he record it for St. Nicholas. Though he had never done so before, he would make an effort. The Jungle Book is the outcome. Dodge turned to write after the death of her husband to make the money necessary to send her sons to school. Read More Read Less