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Oliver Butterworth (1915 to 1990) was born in Connecticut and was mainly an English teacher, both at the junior and senior high level and at the college level. He also wrote four novels but the only one still remembered is The Enormous Egg, published in 1956 and written at the upper elementary to middle school level (but enjoyable by all and a great family read-aloud).
Louis Darling (1916 to 1970) was an American artist and book illustrator. He was also born in Connecticut, served in World War II, and was married for 24 years until his death. He is remembered for his illustration of most of Beverly Cleary’s books, including the famous Henry Huggins series. His pictures in The Enormous Egg provoke the reader to smiles of pleasure, adding much to the story.
This novel is a hilarious account of Nate Twitchell, a boy in rural New Hampshire, whose hen lays a literally enormous egg that hatches out a baby Triceratops! The Twitchell family names the little dinosaur Uncle Beazley, because its large snout reminds them of one of their ancestors. Just like in the Freddy the Pig books, there is gentle satire of the government, especially as the swiftly growing and greatly eating Uncle Beazley is moved to Washington, DC. I read this book to our kids in the early 1990s when we lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a former farming community in the 1950s that had become an urbanized suburb of Washington DC. I was greatly amused when, to get enough hay for the dinosaur to eat, the keepers had to send “clear out to Gaithersburg!” The “science” behind The Enormous Egg, making dinosaurs and birds evolutionary cousins, is erroneous but that is not the point of the book. The point of the book is “what if this happened” and “how funny would it be?!”