Elizabeth Davis Leavitt

Very little confirmed biographical information about this author appears to be readily available online. What can be verified is that Elizabeth Davis Leavitt is credited as the author of The Grasshopper Stories, a children’s book published in 1912 in Jacksonville, Illinois, with illustrations by Maude Dewey Doan.

The book’s continued availability through major public-domain collections suggests that her reputation today rests almost entirely on this work. It is a short collection for young readers, built around simple storytelling, animal life, and lessons about honesty, kindness, and good behavior.

That scarcity of surviving background details gives her a somewhat mysterious place in literary history. Even so, The Grasshopper Stories has lasted long enough to keep her name in circulation, and it still offers a warm example of the moral, imaginative children’s writing popular in the early 1900s.