Pomerantz’s son, Daniel, had asthma problems as a child that led the family to spend winters in Puerto Rico, and some of her stories were set there or incorporated Spanish.ĭr. Her books reflected all sorts of influences, including James Joyce: One book, “Here Comes Henny” (1994, illustrated by Nancy Winslow Parker), was inspired by a passage in “Finnegans Wake,” her daughter, Dr. Pomerantz said in the Alchetron interview. “I started writing because it was the only thing I was ever good at,” Ms. Her first children’s book, “The Bear Who Couldn’t Sleep,” was published in 1965. (Her earlier marriage, to John Meisenbach, had ended in divorce.) After an assortment of jobs, by the early 1960s she was working at Marzani & Munsell, a left-wing publishing house whose founders included Carl Marzani. She graduated from high school in New Rochelle and earned a bachelor’s degree at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953. “These weren’t my parents this was a whole classroom of kids who hardly knew me.” “I don’t recall the story, but I do recall the pure happiness with which I read these comments,” she said. Her father was a pioneering lawyer in the field of shareholder lawsuits against large corporations her mother was a homemaker.Ĭharlotte grew up in Brooklyn and in New Rochelle, N.Y., where, in her last year of elementary school, she had a formative experience: Her teacher read aloud a story Charlotte had written and asked her classmates to write their comments she ended up with a collection of glowing mini-reviews. The first was that it is an environmentalist story, and we wanted more of those, but it is also an environmentalist story written as an extended poem with rhyme but also, and more importantly, with humor and creativity.”Ĭharlotte Inez Pomerantz was born on July 24, 1930, in Brooklyn to Abraham and Phyllis (Cohen) Pomerantz.

As for the cats story - they were dropped by parachute into a village to control a rampant rat population resulting from the cascading effects of DDT - she said: “I was drawn to it for several different reasons. “Charlotte definitely had a ‘little rebel’ streak in her,” Professor Mickenberg said by email. Mickenberg, a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, included the story about the parachuting cats in “Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature,” a 2008 book she edited with Philip Nel. Pomerantz said in a video interview on the website Alchetron, “and those are the things I experienced.” “The political and feminist undercurrents are there because I’m the sum of all my experiences,” Ms.

Charlotte sometimes book