Babbitt’s cover mock-up for an unpublished manuscript. “I ran out of Bs,” the author notes to her editor in the margin of the design.

“I couldn’t make the story work because, among other reasons, the characters should, I knew, have been animals from the beginning—old animals who were turned back into young animals by the stork. But I find it exceedingly difficult to write about talking animals. I like to read stories that have talking animals in them, but I can’t seem to write such stories.”