More than ever before, Jonathan Cott contends in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, today's children are increasingly "streetwise, TV-wise, and R-rated-movie wise... But an information-processing society that neglects to pass on the real wisdom of [children's] tales and rhymes from one generation to another... will eventually become desiccated, distempered, and self-destroying." Childhood, he reminds us, is the time of "our earliest and deepest feelings and truths... our link to the past and a path to the future." And it is Cott's belief that the best children's books are not meant only for children; they are significant sources of delight and wisdom for grown-ups as well. In fact, as Cott argues, it is adults who may need children's books more than their offspring "lest ther be no more Wise Women or Wise Men."
Pipers at the Gates of Dawn consists of Cott's reflections about and encounters with six extraordinary creators of children's literature - Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Astrid Lindgren, Chinua Achebe, P.L. Travers - and with Iona and Peter Opie, the great contemporary scholars of children's lore, games, and language. In seven broad-ranging, incisive essay-interviews, he explores with the authors themselves the lives of their created characters and the characters of their own lives. Despite differences in nationality, generation, and gender, all share with Cott an impassioned sense of the richness, complexity, and lucidity of childhood, and of the enduring importance of children's literature in the lives of all of us.