In 2008, Jill Lepore printed “The Lion and the Mouse,” a fascinating essay a couple of mid-century controversy that helped reshape kids’s literature. Lepore describes how the publication of E. B. White’s traditional story “Stuart Little,” about an adventurous “mouse-child” born to a household in Manhattan, created a stir amongst critics and librarians due to its unconventional (for the interval) melding of fantasy and actuality. White’s e-book provoked questions on which adults ought to resolve what’s appropriate for youngsters (dad and mom? librarians? editors?), or whether or not that duty greatest lies with kids themselves. One strategy to learn “Stuart Little,” Lepore observes, is “as an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture.”
This week, we’re bringing you a choice of items concerning the vibrant world of kids’s literature—which, at its greatest, has all the time defied the conventions of the style and the expectations of younger readers and their dad and mom. In “Among the Wild Things,” printed in 1966, Nat Hentoff explores the radically revolutionary literary model of the creator and illustrator Maurice Sendak. (“The young in Sendak’s books—particularly the books he writes himself—are sometimes troubled and lonely, they slip easily into and out of fantasies, and occasionally they are unruly and stubborn.”) In “The Storyteller,” Cynthia Zarin considers Madeleine L’Engle’s artistic imaginative and prescient and examines the lasting affect of her in style novel “A Wrinkle in Time” and its sequels. In “Far from Well,” printed in 1928, Dorothy Parker evaluations A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh collection and provides a biting critique of “The House at Pooh Corner.” In “Beatrix Potter,” the novelist Laurie Colwin writes concerning the pure model of the creator of the traditional Peter Rabbit collection. (“The book began as a letter to a little boy named Noel Moore, who was recuperating from an illness. ‘My dear Noel,’ the letter begins. ‘I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.’ ”) In “Judy Blume’s Magnificent Girls,” Anna Holmes describes how Blume revolutionized young-adult fiction by vividly rendering the inside lives of her feminine protagonists. Finally, in “How Gyo Fujikawa Drew Freedom in Children’s Books,” Sarah Larson recounts how the Japanese-American artist, whose dad and mom and brother have been despatched to internment camps in 1942, turned one of many nation’s most beloved kids’s illustrators. (“Fujikawa’s illustrations depicted children of all kinds, on adventures of all kinds.”) Taken collectively, these items supply singular insights right into a outstanding style; we hope that they add a little bit of magic to your weekend.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
Maurice Sendak’s incredible creativeness.
Fact, fiction, and the books of Madeleine L’Engle.
Our recurrent hero, Winnie-the-Pooh.
How the celebrated kids’s-book creator revolutionized young-adult fiction.
The battle that reshaped kids’s literature.
The artist, whose profession flourished whilst her household was interned throughout the Second World War, stayed in tune with a toddler’s method of seeing the world and located a method to attract a greater one.
The “Peter Rabbit” creator by no means wrote right down to her younger readers and by no means whitewashed nature on their behalf.
