It is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives--Graham Greene The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives.--Joyce Carol Oates Writers, as they often attest, are deeply influenced by their childhood reading. Salman Rushdie, for example, has said that The Wizard of Oz made a writer of me. Twice-Told Tales is a collection of essays on the way the works of adult writers have been influenced by their childhood reading. This fascinating volume includes theoretical essays on Salman Rushdie and the Oz books, Beauty and the Beast retold as Jane Eyre, the childhood reading of Jorge Luis Borges, and the remnants of nursery rhymes in Sylvia Plath's poetry. It is supplemented with a number of brief commentaries on children's books by major creative writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston and Maxine Kumin.

This book contains more than one thousand separate rhymes from the earliest surviving publications to the present day making it the most complete collection ever assembled. The rhymes are usually given in their earlisest published form.