William Steig, Not an Idiot

Still reposting from a an old series of posts on a few of the author/illustrators of classic children’s literature. (In other children’s literature news, author and book editor Charlotte Zolotow died yesterday.)

William Steig was one of my children’s favorite picture book authors, but they knew him mostly for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Doctor De Soto, Abel’s Island, and others of his older books. My kids grew up before the days of Shrek!, now made famous by the movie, which is probably the only way many contemporary children know Steig. 

The best part of William Steig’s picture books are his quirky drawings. But no picture book gets by on drawings alone; the story has to be good, too. William Steig’s stories are the perfect match for his illustrations—eccentric, silly, but also heroic and philosophical, and told in language that is literary, sophisticated, yet full of good humour. There’s no dumbing down for children in William Steig’s books!

His whimsical books were serious business to William Steig. In his Sylvester and the Magic Pebble Caldecott Award acceptance speech, he said that

[a]rt, including juvenile literature, … helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery.

Steig didn’t start out doing children’s books. He began as an artist, and what he called “just drawing” was always what he liked best. But an artist has to make money, and Steig made his money as a cartoonist, most notably in The New Yorker. He was the magazine’s longest-running contributor, with over one hundred cover illustrations and one thousand cartoons attributed to him by the time of his death in 2003 at the age of 96. His cartoons from The New Yorker are still copyrighted, so I won’t post one, but you can check out Man in a Deep Depression or Say “I Love You” to see what they were like. On the right is his The New Yorker cover from July of 1953.

Steig supplemented his income from The New Yorker by doing other illustrating work, including making greeting cards. He claimed to be the pioneer of the contemporary humourous greeting card—the first create something other than sickeningly sweet Victorian type cards. He also drew advertising cartoons, which he didn’t enjoy. Those jobs ended abruptly when he told the advertising firm he was working for that they were “a bunch of idiots.”

Click to read more ...

Virginia Lee Burton, Artist at Home

This is another repost of from a an old series of posts on a few of the author/illustrators of classic children’s literature.

Virginia Lee Burton created the wonderful machinery heroines (Yes, they were girls!) like Mary Anne, the obsolete steam shovel who finds a new line of work in Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and Katy the determined little tractor in Katy and the Big Snow. Virginia Lee Burton, the name used for all her children’t books, was her maiden name. More officially, and in her other works, she was Virginia Lee Demetrios, wife of George Demetrios, and mother of the two little boys for whom she was creating books.

Virginia Lee Burton’s life and work has several remarkable similarities to Wanda Gag’s life and work, starting with the turn her life took because of difficult circumstances in her family. Wanda Gag gave up some of her dreams to support her family after her father died, while Virginia Lee Burton hoped to be a dancer, and had just signed a contract to be in her sister’s dance troupe when her father broke his leg. She chose to stay home to look after him instead of travelling as a dancer. That, she said, “was the beginning and end of my dancing career, which was just as well, because I wasn’t very good anyway.”

While at home in Boston, Virginia Lee took a job as a “sketcher” for the Boston Transcript, making sketches of dancers and actors to accompany articles written by the drama and music critic. It was in Boston that she enrolled in a drawing class taught by George Demetrios, an art teacher who had come highly recommended to her, and whom, after only a few months, she married.

Once she had her two sons, Virginia Lee became interested in producing books for children. She tested both the stories and the drawings on her own children, adjusting things (or not) depending on their reactions. “Children,” she said, “are very frank critics.” And excellent ones, too, judging by the quality of the finished work her collaboration with her sons produced.

Click to read more ...

Wanda Gág, Free to Imagine

According to my long-ago children’s literature professor, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats was the first children’s book to use a repeated refrain throughout. (You know it, right?: “…hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats!”) It was a technique used in oral versions of folk tales, but it hadn’t made its way into books before Wanda Gág wrote this one. It was also the first children’s book to use a double-paged spread and hand lettered text.

People thought of Wanda Gág as a “free spirit”, and her work is unique and innovative, but she was hardly free. She was a Minnesota native, the oldest of seven children, and only fourteen when her father died of tuberculosis. His last words to her were “what Papa has left undone, Wanda will have to do.”

And so she did. It was her work doing odd jobs illustrating magazine articles, greeting cards, and calendars that made the money that kept the family together. She graduated from high school in 1912, but didn’t feel free to accept her scholarship to art school until the next two sisters had graduated, too, and were established as teachers.

Click to read more ...