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.

保羅·歐·澤林斯基(Paul O. Zelinsky)1955年齣生於美國伊利諾伊州的威爾梅特，幼時曾經夢想過成為口技師、建築師、自然史學傢，1970年進入耶魯大學學習。二年級時選修瞭童書大師莫裏斯·桑達剋一門關於繪本曆史與藝術的課程，開始對繪本産生興趣。1974年至1976年在位於意大利羅馬和美國費城的坦普爾大學泰勒藝術學院學習繪畫，畢業後在加利福尼亞州任教，不久後來到紐約，正式走上童書創作之路。他曾獲得卡爾·桑德堡文學奬、美國圖書館協會傑齣童書和由國際閱讀協會頒發的“兒童之選”大奬等多項殊榮，並四度榮獲凱迪剋奬：《風鈴草姑娘》獲凱迪剋金奬，《休儒怪》《亨捨爾和格萊特》和《沼澤天使》獲凱迪剋銀奬。現與妻子黛博拉、女兒安娜和雷切爾定居紐約，常在創作之餘享受美食與烹飪的樂趣。