Laura Joffe Numeroff is an American author and illustrator of children's books who is best known as the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Numeroff was born in Brooklyn, New York, and is the youngest of three girls. As a child, Numeroff was an avid reader and by the age of 9 had decided she wanted to be a writer when she became an adult. She credits her current profession to two specific childhood favorites and has claimed that they “are the reason” she is a writer: E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Kay Thompson’s Eloise.