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The universe of dePaola’s books is moral but not moralistic. Though I surely wouldn’t have been able to articulate this at the time, to encounter, as a child, dePaola’s visual and writerly voice-clear-eyed, sympathetic, gently sly-felt like coming across an ally with whom to brave that jungle.

Even under the best of circumstances, navigating one’s way through childhood can be brutal, like clearing a path in a jungle’s thicket. The books have an unusual emotional and artistic power, which I immediately sensed when I read them as a girl. DePaola, the prolific, celebrated writer and illustrator-who died, last Monday, at age eighty-five, due to complications from surgery after a head injury caused by a fall-created more than two hundred and seventy works for children. For reasons of age or taste, what was once adored no longer resonates. There are books that you read and love as a child that, when you pick them up years later, seem suddenly like near-strangers.