Three famous writers--Eudora Welty, Madeleine L'Engle, and Jack London--used their silent reading experiences to survive not only their childhoods, but also to become adult chroniclers of human lives. Pulitzer-prize winning author Eudora Welty credits an extended period of silent reading when she was 7 years old (and home from school for nearly a…

In order to document the self-directed, spontaneous growth in literary output of a six-year-old child, her writings during a one month period were collected and compiled. It was discovered that the child used writing to organize knowledge about the environment and the operations of print, to maintain personal relations, to establish impersonal or…