Happy St. Nicholas Day! Â For today’s treat, it’s the holiday tunes that no December should be without. Â Well, in my humble opinion, anyway. Â Over the past decade, I’ve assembled 9 or 10 different holiday mixes (all with completely different songs). Â The idea for this mix is to include favorites from all of those mixes. Â In
With thanks to the Children’s and Adolescent Literature Community (ChALC) for organizing the event, we held a Mock Caldecott at the Manhattan Public Library this afternoon. And, yes, of course, we weren’t able to get all of the books we wanted to look at – so, there are quite likely candidates we didn’t get to
Cushlamochree! 70 years after Crockett Johnson‘s Barnaby made its debut, the entire ten-year run (1942-1952) will be published in full … for the first time!  Daniel Clowes will design the books – five in all, the first of which will appear in 2012. I’ll be providing biographical & historical notes.  The publisher is Fantagraphics, whose lovingly
The first dramatic adaptation of Crockett Johnson‘s Barnaby appeared on the Frank Morgan Show of June 12, 1945.  Morgan (best known as the title character in MGM’s Wizard of Oz) played Mr. O’Malley, Norma Jean Nilsson played Barnaby, and Ralph Bellamy played Mr. Baxter. The radio dramatization begins in the second half of the show – at 15:30 of the
For those who care about such minutiae, here are some outtakes from Chapter 14, “At Home with Ruth and Dave” – from which I’ve just cut 540 words. Â The chapter, which covers Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss in 1947 and 1948, draws heavily on Ruth’s 123-page account of their daily lives in late winter 1948:
Meeting interesting people is one of the benefits of writing a biography. I never met Syd Hoff (1912-2004) in person, but we corresponded and talked on the phone in 2000. You may know Hoff as the author of Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) or as the creator of over hundreds of New Yorker cartoons. As
When I was about 9 years old, watching television one weekend afternoon, I saw a black-and-white film of a bespectacled man climbing the side of a building. He ascends a floor, narrowly misses falling, is about to enter the building through the window – then, another man emerges, with a policeman in pursuit, and tells
Working in a little biography-editing while at the American Studies Association conference in San Antonio. Â (Why, yes, I would like some more workahol. Â Thank you for offering!) Â I’ve just condensed three paragraphs on Crockett Johnson‘s visit to Commonwealth College (radical labor school in Mena, Arkansas, 1922-1940) down to a single paragraph. Â For the record, that
In advance of the film’s release, Kansas State University’s Media Relations asked us to talk about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Â We did. Â They taped us, and edited the results down to 3 minutes. Â Karin is on the right. Â And that’s me on the left. They also put out a news release on Friday
One reason that so much must be thrown out from a biography – or, at least, from my forthcoming biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss – is that a lot of research can underwrite a very small fact. Â For example, I sometimes had to read a book in order to write a single sentence.