Jean Merrill, 1923-2012.

So... should we be building a kidlit bunker, or what? Yeesh.

From the NYT:

Jean Merrill, a children’s author best known for her 1964 book, “The Pushcart War,” about street peddlers in New York who use (nonlethal) guerrilla tactics and savvy publicity maneuvers to fight back when unbridled Big Business threatens to banish their pushcarts from the streets — a book, in other words, that Mother Jones or Saul Alinsky might have produced had they been writers of whimsical allegories — died on Aug. 2 at her home in Randolph, Vt. She was 89.

Also, is The Pushcart War out of print? The prices at Amazon seem to suggest that. Blasphemy.