Ruth Stiles Gannett is an American children's writer best known for the My Father's Dragon trilogy, also known as the Elmer and the Dragons series. Born in 1923, Gannett was educated in New York City, graduating from the City and Country School in Greenwich Village in 1937. There, she recalled later, she benefited from being "allowed and encouraged to write for fun." She also attended the George School and Vassar College. After graduating from Vassar in 1944, Gannett moved to Boston, where she worked at Boston General Hospital and the Massachusetts Radiation Laboratory. She later worked at a ski lodge and then returned home to live with her parents, where she completed her best-known work, My Father's Dragon. The first title in the three-book series, My Father's Dragon was published by Random House in 1948 and was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal. Gannett added two more novels to the series, Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland. The series has since been translated into 14 languages. The author's stepmother, Ruth Chrisman Gannett, illustrated the series, and her husband, H. Peter Kahn, an artist, art history professor, and calligrapher whom she married in 1947, designed its typography. Gannett wrote two other short children's novels, The Wonderful House-Boat-Train, published in 1949, and Katie and the Sad Noise, published in 1961. She and Kahn had seven daughters.
