Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a 1971 children's science fiction/fantasy book by Robert C. O'Brien, with illustrations by Zena Bernstein. The novel was published by the Los Angeles publishing house Atheneum Books. This book was the winner of numerous awards including the 1972 Newbery Medal. Ten years following its publication, the story was adapted for film as The Secret of NIMH (1982). The novel revolves around a colony of escaped lab rats—the rats of NIMH—who live in a technologically sophisticated and literate society mimicking that of humans. They come to the aid of Mrs. Frisby, a widowed field mouse who seeks to protect her children and home from destruction by a farmer's plow. The rats of NIMH were inspired by the research of John B. Calhoun on mouse and rat population dynamics at the National Institute of Mental Health from the 1940s to the 1960s. After O'Brien's death in 1973, his daughter Jane Leslie Conly wrote two sequels to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.