For Crockett Johnson’s 116th Birthday, here is the signed first edition of Harold and the Purple Crayon that he gave to Maurice Sendak. During this period, he was spending many a weekend at the Rowayton home of Johnson and Ruth Krauss, working on her children’s books. Between 1951 and 1960, Sendak illustrated 8 of Krauss’s books.
I recently finished writing my notes and afterword for Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, Volume Five: 1950-1952 (Fantagraphics, forthcoming 2023). When I opened up the “Afterword” document, I found a two-paragraph fragment chronicling a holiday that Crockett Johnson (whose friends called him by his given name, Dave) and Ruth Krauss took in 1950 or 1951. A decade
How do you translate children’s colloquial speech – with its flexible syntax, unusual diction – into another language? In celebration of Ruth Krauss’ 119th birthday (or what she would have called her 109th birthday), I’ll sketch two possible answers to that question by looking at A Hole Is to Dig in the language her grandmother spoke: German!
For the first time in 32 years, there is a new book by Ruth Krauss! Roar Like a Dandelion, with art from Sergio Ruzzier, was published on the first of the month. Krauss began writing the book in around 1960, just after she began to focus more on writing poetry or poem-plays and less on
In honor of Ruth Krauss’s 117th birthday (today, which she would have celebrated as her 107th birthday), here’s a photo you likely have not seen before. It appeared in the May 12, 1951 issue of the Herald Tribune Book News, which described Krauss’s latest book (I Can Fly, illustrated by Mary Blair) as follows: “Very small girl
Today is the 111th birthday of Crockett Johnson (1906-1975). To celebrate, let’s take a deep dive in his oeuvre – looking at one of his lesser-known books, This Rich World. The popular story is that Crockett Johnson began creating books for children when he illustrated Ruth Krauss’s The Carrot Seed (1945). This is a compelling
quotation from Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig (1952), on the L.A. Public Library. If she were alive today, you would be wishing Ruth Krauss a very happy 106th birthday. And yet Krauss was actually born 116 years ago, not 106 years ago. Look at the date in the upper-right-hand side of the document:
You may not know the name Morton Schindel, but you certainly know the people he worked with. At his Weston Woods Studios, using his “iconographic” technique, he adapted works by Maurice Sendak, Robert McCloskey, James Daugherty, Ezra Jack Keats, Tomi Ungerer, and William Steig, among others. His film of Steig’s Doctor De Soto was nominated
For America’s Independence Day, here’s a little-known chapter in the history of American anti-racism. Following the Second World War, progressives founded a dozen planned integrated communities across the country. While working on my biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, I learned about one of those communities – a section of Norwalk Connecticut directly adjacent
This past Friday, I spent the afternoon at Crockett Johnson’s house – 74 Rowayton Avenue (Rowayton, Connecticut), where he and Ruth Krauss lived from 1945 to 1973. Though I wrote their biography and had seen (and photographed) the house from the outside, I’d never been inside. I’ve seen all of their homes from the outside,
