Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates; Fiction, Fact and Fancy concerning the Buccaneers and marooners of the Spanish Main was written for children. Pyle has a gift for making his characters spring from the page as real flesh and blood people. Pyle begins with the lure of the pirate life, which lurks beneath the surface of many a respectable person. "WHY is it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an unpleasantly titillating twang to the great mass of respectable flour that goes to make up the pudding of our modern civilization? And pertinent to this question another--Why is it that the pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about? Is there, deep under the accumulated debris of culture, a hidden groundwork of the old-time savage? Is there even in these well-regulated times an unsubdued nature in the respectable mental household of every one of us that still kicks against the pricks of law and order? To make my meaning more clear, would not every boy, for instance--that is, every boy of any account--rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament?"

Howard Pyle (March 5, 1853—November 9, 1911) was an American illustrator and author, primarily of books for young people. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy. In 1894 he began teaching illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry. After 1900, he founded his own school of art and illustration, named the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art. The scholar Henry C. Pitz later used the term Brandywine School for the illustration artists and Wyeth family artists of the Brandywine region, several of whom had studied with Pyle. Pyle's home and studio in Wilmington, where he taught his students, is still standing and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.