Background
The Good Master was written after May Massee, children's editor for Viking Press, suggested that illustrator Kate Seredy should write a story about her childhood in Hungary. The events in the book are based on summers Seredy spent with her father on the rural plains while he studied peasant life. The book evokes the folk customs and way of life of old Hungary.
The Singing Tree, also a Newbery Honor book, is a sequel to The Good Master and describes the changes brought by World War I to the people and countryside.
Read more about this topic: The Good Master
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)