1942) is a bestselling children’s book author and illustrator. Born in New York City, Wells was raised in New Jersey. She grew up in an artistic family; her mother was a ballet dancer and her father was an actor-playwright. “We had a houseful of wonderful books. Reading stories aloud was as much a part of my childhood as the air I breathed,” Wells recalls. “It was also the golden age of childhood, now much changed for my grandchildren.” Her love of illustrating also began at an early age, and she started drawing at two years old. When she was older, Wells attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She married Thomas Moore Wells in 1963, and the pair lived in Boston for two years while she worked as a book designer for Allyn & Bacon, a textbook publisher. The couple moved to New York in 1965, when Tom entered Columbia University for his graduate degree in architecture, and Wells went to work for the trade publisher Macmillan. Her first book, an illustrated edition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s A Song to Sing, O!, was published in 1968.
