Surely among the most original and gifted of children's book illustrators, Paul O. Zelinsky has once again with unmatched emotional authority, control of space, and narrative capability brought forth a unique vision for an age-old tale. Few artists at work today can touch the level at which his paintings tell a story and exert their hold. Zelinsky's retelling of Rapunzel reaches back beyond the Grimms to a late-seventeenth-century French tale by Mlle. la Force, who based hers on the Neapolitan tale Petrosinella in a collection popular at the time. The artist understands the story's fundamentals to be about possessiveness,confinement, and separation, rather than about punishment and deprivation. Thus the tower the sorceress gives Rapunzel here is not a desolate, barren structure of denial but one of esoteric beauty on the outside and physical luxury within. And the world the artist creates through the elements in his paintings the palette, control of light, landscape, characters, architecture, interiors, costumes speaks to us not of an ugly witch who cruelly imprisons a beautiful young girl, but of a mother figure who powerfully resists her child's inevitable growth, and of a young woman and man who must struggle in the wilderness for the self-reliance that is the true beginning of their adulthood. As ever, and yet always somehow in newly arresting fashion, Paul O. Zelinsky's work thrillingly shows us the events of the story while guiding us beyond them to the truths that have made it endure.

保罗·欧·泽林斯基(Paul O. Zelinsky)1955年出生于美国伊利诺伊州的威尔梅特，幼时曾经梦想过成为口技师、建筑师、自然史学家，1970年进入耶鲁大学学习。二年级时选修了童书大师莫里斯·桑达克一门关于绘本历史与艺术的课程，开始对绘本产生兴趣。1974年至1976年在位于意大利罗马和美国费城的坦普尔大学泰勒艺术学院学习绘画，毕业后在加利福尼亚州任教，不久后来到纽约，正式走上童书创作之路。他曾获得卡尔·桑德堡文学奖、美国图书馆协会杰出童书和由国际阅读协会颁发的“儿童之选”大奖等多项殊荣，并四度荣获凯迪克奖：《风铃草姑娘》获凯迪克金奖，《休儒怪》《亨舍尔和格莱特》和《沼泽天使》获凯迪克银奖。现与妻子黛博拉、女儿安娜和雷切尔定居纽约，常在创作之余享受美食与烹饪的乐趣。