Robert J. Burch (June 25, 1925 – December 25, 2007) was an American writer of 19 children's books whose readers are "usually young adolescents".
[1] Many of his stories are based on his childhood experiences in rural Georgia during the Great Depression.
According to Dictionary of Literary Biography, his best books feature "realistic details of country and small-town life in middle and northern Georgia" during the Great Depression, the setting of his own childhood.
[1] "His books are infused with his genial, optimistic view of life while maintaining a realistic, nonsentimental, serious, and moralistic approach.
"[1] Burch and Queenie Peavy won the second annual Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association in 1986, recognizing the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award.