Marie Hall Ets is an American author and illustrator. She attended Lawrence College, and in 1918, Mrs. Ets journeyed to Chicago where she became a social worker at the Chicago Commons, a settlement house on the northwest side of the city. In 1960 she won the Caldecott Medal

Caldecott Medal

The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children , a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year. The award was named in honor of nineteenth-century English...

 for her illustrations of Nine Days to Christmas. She died in 1984. Just me and In the Forest are both Caldecott Honor books. The black-and-white charcoal illustrations in Just Me "almost take on the appearance of woodcuts" and are similar in style to the illustrations in In the Forest. Constantine Georgiou comments in Children and Their Literature that Ets' "picture stories and easy-to-read books" (along with those of Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak

Maurice Bernard Sendak is an American writer and illustrator of children's literature. He is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963.-Early life:...

) "are filled with endearing and quaint human touches, putting them at precisely the right angle to life in early childhood." Play With Me, says Georgiou, is "a tender little tale, delicately illustrated in fragile pastels that echo the quiet mood of the story."