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:
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.
Will publishing the “outtakes” from my forthcoming The Purple Crayon and a Hole to Dig: The Lives of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (UP Mississippi, 2012) help to promote the book or dissuade people from picking it up? Â After all, these are the bits cut from the book, not the parts that remain. Â Well, since
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, here’s a Ruth Krauss book you might not know: This Breast Gothic, a poetry collection published by the Bookstore Press (Lenox, Mass.) in 1973. Â And, yes, the illustration is by Krauss herself. The author of The Carrot Seed (1945) and A Hole Is to Dig (1952) was also
Though they had lived together since 1940 and married in 1943, this 1944 photograph is the first one to include both Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. Â Taken by Frank Gerratana, it appeared in the Sunday Herald (Bridgeport, Conn.) of October 1, 1944. Â In my biography of Johnson and Krauss, I’m using a print of the
A 1943 letter from Crockett Johnson. Asked about himself, he dodges the question.
Is it just me, or does “This is the lady who knows what children think — BEFORE THEY DO” sound like the tag line for a horror movie? Â You will be relieved to know that Ruth Krauss could not read children’s minds. But she was an excellent and sympathetic listener. In her earliest work, she