The Devil's Arithmetic

Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen was an American writer and editor whose unusually broad career ranged across children’s literature, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She brought a storyteller’s economy to very different forms, often using folklore, fairy tale, or speculative devices to make history and ordinary experience newly visible. In Owl Moon, patient observation and lyrical restraint turn a nighttime walk into an intimate rite; the playful How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? enlarges a familiar family ritual through comic fantasy. Her historical writing could be darker and structurally more complex. The Devil’s Arithmetic sends a contemporary child into the Holocaust, while Briar Rose recasts Sleeping Beauty as a frame for recovered family history; Encounter revisits Columbus’s arrival from a Taino child’s wary perspective. Across these works, Yolen repeatedly joined accessible storytelling to questions of memory, inheritance, moral attention, and the ways stories carry the past. Her large body of work also included editing and collaborations with her children.