NEW YORK — As a boy, I never had much regard for the storybooks written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter in the first decades of the 20th century. Her watercolors were treacly and her tales too simple-minded and rustic. I lived in a world of plastic and plenitude; what use did I have for wayward rabbits, riddling squirrels and foppish frogs? I preferred the brighter and bolder books of Dr. Seuss, whose humor was sharper to my ear, satirizing the fragility, chaos and absurdity just under the surface of daily life when America was at the apex of her postwar power.