While visiting the magical world to buy necessities, David has a brief adventure with a prankster Leprechaun, meets a cantankerous potion-selling hag, and a faun.

Describing his employment history as “hopelessly mixed in my memory” Ormondroyd worked for a number of industrial enterprises, including a paper processing plant in the Berkeley area, as well as an able-bodied seaman on oil tankers that serviced operations in Alaska and Hawaii.

It was as if the choice made me, rather than the other way around.”[7] The origins and inspiration for his fantasy character the Phoenix were recalled by Ormandroyd in 2011: I was walking on the UC Berkeley campus when a vision flashed in my mind of a large bird hurling itself out of an upstairs window and becoming entangled in a rose arbor below.

attributes his “vision” to a number of literary influences, among them T. H. White’s adventure The Sword in the Stone (1938), while the personality of the Phoenix may have had its origin in the “pompous” Major Hoople, featured in the newspaper cartoon Our Boarding House.

[12] David and the Phoenix reached a wide audience when it was included in Weekly Reader Book Club and was awarded the silver medal for best juvenile story of 1957.

[13] This book enjoyed a resurgence of popularity early in the 2000s in the wake of Harry Potter and the filming of Roald Dahl novels.

As of October 2005, there had been negotiations between the author and a private animation-film company to produce a feature-length "David and the Phoenix" screen adaptation.

"[citation needed] A 1967 Dark Shadows storyline featuring Laura Collins (Diana Millay), apparently a woman, but in actuality a phoenix, who tries to lay claim to a nine-year-old boy named David.

The original cover of At All Costs shows Honor Harrington reading from David and the Phoenix to her infant son Raoul.