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.”

Their loss is our gain, since it was partly his lost advertising income that made the invitation to try his hand at children’s books so intriguing to him. A colleague at The New Yorker, Robert Krause, was publishing children’s books and invited Steig to do one, so at sixty years old, he tried his hand at something new. The result was C D B! , a letter puzzle book, then Roland, The Minstrel Pig, the book that started the storybook ball rolling, and the rest are children’s literature history: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Amos & Boris, Caleb and Kate, Yellow & Pink, Brave Irene and many more.

Here’s another Steig cartoon:

Another The New Yorker cover, this one from 1968:

And a couple of his “just drawings”:

Red Ball

Family Reunion

When asked about his recipe for success in children’s books, Steig said,

I enjoyed my childhood … . I like to think that I’ve kept a little innocence. Probably I’m too dumb to do anything else.

He underestimates himself, I think.

Comments

[Kim Shay]

That is such a great quotation!