TIME’S 100: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

| Mind & Glimpses

The Snowy Day

by Ezra Jack Keats 

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Time.com/100-best-childrens-books/

 GOODREADS SAYS:

Rating: 4.14

Winner of the 1963 Caldecott Medal!

No book has captured the magic and sense of possibility of the first snowfall better than The Snowy Day. Universal in its appeal, the story has become a favorite of millions, as it reveals a child’s wonder at a new world, and the hope of capturing and keeping that wonder forever.

The adventures of a little boy in the city on a very snowy day.

“Keats’s sparse collage illustrations capture the wonder and beauty a snowy day can bring to a small child.”—Barnes & Noble

“Ezra Jack Keats’s classic The Snowy Day, winner of the 1963 Caldecott Medal, pays homage to the wonder and pure pleasure a child experiences when the world is blanketed in snow.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“The book is notable not only for its lovely artwork and tone, but also for its importance as a trailblazer. According to Horn Book magazine, The Snowy Day was “the very first full-color picture book to feature a small black hero”—yet another reason to add this classic to your shelves. It’s as unique and special as a snowflake.”—Amazon.com

Literary Awards:

Caldecott Medal (1963)

NPR SAYS:

‘The Snowy Day’: Breaking Color Barriers, Quietly

One morning many years ago, a little boy in Brooklyn named Peter woke up to an amazing sight: fresh snow.

Peter is the hero of the classic children’s book by Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day, which turns 50 this year. Peter has a red snowsuit, a stick just right for knocking snow off of trees, and a snowball in his pocket. And, though this is never mentioned in the text, Peter is African-American.

“It wasn’t important. It wasn’t the point,” Deborah Pope tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. Pope is the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.

“The point is that this is a beautiful book about a child’s encounter with snow, and the wonder of it,” Pope says. Peter was among the first non-caricatured African-Americans to be featured in a major children’s book. But Pope says Keats — who was white — wasn’t necessarily trying to make a statement about race when he created Peter.

“He said, well, all the books he had ever illustrated, there had never been a child of color, and they’re out there — they should be in the books, too,” Pope says. “But was he trying to make a cause book, was he trying to make a point? No.”

That approach earned Keats a lot of criticism from civil rights leaders who felt he had not gone far enough. “They were worried,” Pope says. “This was a time when the African-American community was fighting for a place at the table, was fighting to be heard … and in the past, when white authors had written about black characters, it had not done well. It was not good.”

But The Snowy Day became a huge hit. It won the Caldecott Medal, given to outstanding picture books. It was embraced by parents, teachers and children of all colors — and eventually the criticism subsided.

Ezra Jack Keats wrote and illustrated nearly 25 books for kids, and illustrated more than 80. He died in 1983.

“It was no longer necessary that the book say, ‘I am an African-American child going out into the snow today,’ ” Pope says. “They realized that you don’t put a color on a child’s experience of the snow.”

Keats received thousands of fan letters from children, featuring their own versions of his deceptively simple collage illustrations. Even children in places like decidedly un-snowy Florida could relate to Peter’s adventures. But one of the most touching reports came from a teacher whose students had read The Snowy Day.

“There was a teacher [who] wrote in to Ezra, saying, ‘The kids in my class, for the first time, are using brown crayons to draw themselves.’ ” Pope says. “These are African-American children. Before this, they drew themselves with pink crayons. But now, they can see themselves.”

Keats’ Inspiration

In 1940, Life magazine published a short photo essay focused on a little boy in Liberty County, Ga., who was about to undergo a blood test. Keats was struck by the sweet images of the child, and cut the group of photographs out of the magazine. That little boy was the inspiration for Keats’ character Peter, the African-American protagonist of The Snowy Day and six books that followed.

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WIKIPEDIA SAYS:

The Snowy Day is a 1962 children’s picture book by American author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats. Keats received the 1963 Caldecott Medal for his illustrations in the book.[1] It features a boy named Peter exploring his neighborhood after the first snowfall of the season. The inspiration for Peter came from a Life magazine photo article from 1940, and Keats’ desire to have minority children of New York as central characters in his stories.[2] Peter appears in six more books, growing from a small boy in The Snowy Day to pre-adolescence in A Letter to Amy.

Life and career

After serving in World War II, Keats returned to New York and started a career in illustration, working first in the comic industry, and then working for such publications as Reader’s Digest, The New York Times Book Review, and Collier’s. In the 1950s Keats started illustrating dust jackets, and when one book cover caught the eye of an editor of youth literature, Keats was soon commissioned to illustrate children’s books.

Keats started solely as an illustrator for the work of other authors. But he soon observed that few children’s books showcased an African-American or other minority child as the main character. Published in 1962, The Snowy Day was the first book Keats both authored and illustrated, and was a milestone for featuring the first African-American protagonist in a full-color picture book. “None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along,” Keats wrote in an unpublished autobiography (portions of which have been printed in various publications since the author’s death).[3]

Peter in The Snowy Day was inspired by a strip of photographs of an African-American boy that Keats had clipped from a May 1940 issue of Life magazine. “Years ago, long before I ever thought of doing children’s books, while looking through a magazine I came across four candid photos of a little boy about three or four years old,” said Keats in his acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature, which he won for The Snowy Day in 1963. “His expressive face, his body attitudes, the very way he wore his clothes, totally captivated me . . . . As the years went by, these pictures would find their way back to my walls, offering me fresh pleasure at each encounter. In more recent years, while illustrating children’s books, the desire to do my own story about this little boy began to germinate. Up he went again—this time above my drawing table. He was my model and inspiration.”[4]

The source for the story-line, Keats noted, came from his memories of snowy days in his Brooklyn childhood. Above all, Keats wanted to capture the wonderment of a child’s first snowfall, a feeling universal to all children, regardless of race. “I wanted to convey the joy of being a little boy alive on a certain kind of day—of being for that moment. The air is cold, you touch the snow, aware of the things to which all children are so open.”[5]

The Snowy Day was immediately welcomed by educators and critics and embraced by the public. The book is noteworthy not only as a benchmark in racial representation in literature, but also for the simplicity and elegance of the writing, which many be attributed to Keats’s love of haiku poetry. The beautiful illustrations also marked the book as a great accomplishment of art in a children’s book. Keats, who was a painter first and foremost, chose to illustrate the book with collage, a medium he had never used before. “The idea of using collage came to me at the same time I was thinking about the story. I used a bit of paper here and there and immediately saw new colors, patterns, and relationships forming.”[6]

Critical reception

As the Civil Rights Movement entered a new phase of black cultural consciousness in the mid- to late-1960s, The Snowy Day began to meet with some criticism. “After The Snowy Day was published, many, many people thought I was black,” said Keats. “As a matter of fact, many were disappointed that I wasn’t!”[6] A 1965 Saturday Review article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” criticized Keats for not addressing Peter’s race in the text. In the 1970s, some critics argued that The Snowy Day was too integrationist, and did not truly represent or celebrate African-American cultural or racial identity. By the 1980s the cultural landscape had shifted again. “How many literary light years separate Little Black Sambo from The Snowy Day?” a critic wrote. “Although we have been led to believe by twenty years of reporting that Keats’s work was special because of his use of collage, it is his vision of the universal human spirit as personified in one pre-school black youngster that marks this book for attention.”[7]

Throughout these debates, The Snowy Day has remained a deeply loved and profoundly influential book. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children.”[8] In 2012 it was ranked number five among the “Top 100 Picture Books” in a survey published by School Library Journal.[9]

Animated adaptation

An animated Christmas special based on the book was released on Amazon on November 25, 2016. The special is narrated by Laurence Fishburne, who also produced the special, and features music from Boyz II Men. It was produced by Fishburne’s Cinema Gypsy Productions and Karrot Animation.[10]

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COMMON SENSE SAYS:

Classic captures a kid’s delight in freshly fallen snow.

WHAT PARENTS NEED TO KNOW

Parents need to know that The Snowy Day follows a boy discovering the pleasures of new-fallen snow. Bright color cut-outs and lively language complement each other to create a story that’s both soothing and exciting.

WHAT’S THE STORY?

A young boy wakes to a world of freshly fallen snow and goes exploring throughout the cityscape in this gentle, glistening classic. With bold text and whimsical collages, Ezra Jack Keats captures the delight kids feel in the simplest pleasures.

IS IT ANY GOOD?

THE SNOWY DAY challenges the assumption that more is better, inviting you and your kids into a world of slow, easy pleasures. Ezra Keats is remarkable in his ability to create a calming yet vibrant story, striking this balance gracefully in pictures and in text. His artwork is spare yet the pictures burst with brilliant color and expression. In many of the pictures, Peter lacks facial features except his eyes, but Keats manages, with the angle of his head and the composition, to convey feeling.

The text, similarly economical, is made up of just enough words to tell the story — none of them too hard for a young reader to sound out or for a young listener to understand — and they are vivid words used powerfully, often rhyming or repeating. The result is that kids (and parents too!) can settle into Peter’s snowy world. A bonus in this sparkling story is the African-American main character — an all-too-rare occurrence, still, in children’s literature.

TALK TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT …

  • Families can talk about the pleasures of different types of weather: snowy days, rainy days, windy days, and more. Which is your favorite type of weather? Why?
  • How easy is it to create fun by yourself? Is it sometimes as much or more fun than playing with others?

BOOK DETAILS

 

TIME’S 100: Where The Wild Things Are By Maurice Sendak

| Mind & Glimpses

Where The Wild Things Are

By Maurice Sendak

Time.com/100-best-childrens-books/

GOODREADS SAYS:

RATING:  4.22

One night Max puts on his wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind and another, so his mother calls him ‘Wild Thing’ and sends him to bed without his supper. That night a forest begins to grow in Max’s room and an ocean rushes by with a boat to take Max to the place where the wild things are. Max tames the wild things and crowns himself as their king, and then the wild rumpus begins. But when Max has sent the monsters to bed, and everything is quiet, he starts to feel lonely and realises it is time to sail home to the place where someone loves him best of all.

Literary Awards:

Caldecott Medal (1964), Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, Indies Choice Book Award for Picture Book Hall of Fame (2009)

ADAPTED MOVIE:

WIKIPEDIA SAYS:

Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children’s picture book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, originally published by Harper & Row. The book has been adapted into other media several times, including an animated short in 1974 (with an updated version in 1988); a 1980 opera; and a live-action 2009 feature-film adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze. The book had sold over 19 million copies worldwide as of 2009, with 10 million of those being in the United States.[2]

Sendak won the annual Caldecott Medal from the children’s librarians in 1964, recognizing Wild Things as the previous year’s “most distinguished American picture book for children”.[3] It was voted the number one picture book in a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, not for the first time.[4]

Plot

This story of only 338 words focuses on a young boy named Max who, after dressing in his wolf costume, wreaks such havoc through his household that he is sent to bed without his supper. Max’s bedroom undergoes a mysterious transformation into a jungle environment, and he winds up sailing to an island inhabited by malicious beasts known as the “Wild Things.” After successfully intimidating the creatures, Max is hailed as the king of the Wild Things and enjoys a playful romp with his subjects. However, he starts to feel lonely and decides to return home, to the Wild Things’ dismay. Upon returning to his bedroom, Max discovers a hot supper waiting for him.

Development

Sendak began his career as an illustrator, but by the mid-1950s he had decided to start both writing and illustrating his own books.[5] In 1956, he published his first book for which he was the sole author, Kenny’s Window (1956). Soon after, he began work on another solo effort. The story was supposed to be that of a child who, after a tantrum, is punished in his room and decides to escape to the place that gives the book its title, the “land of wild horses”.[5] Shortly before starting the illustrations, Sendak realized he did not know how to draw horses and, at the suggestion of his editor, changed the wild horses to the more ambiguous “Wild Things”, a term inspired by the Yiddish expression “vilde chaya” (“wild animals”), used to indicate boisterous children.[6]

He replaced the horses with caricatures of his aunts and uncles, caricatures that he had originally drawn in his youth as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits, on Sunday afternoons, to his family’s Brooklyn home. Sendak, as a child, had observed his relatives as being “all crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes”, with blood-stained eyes and “big and yellow” teeth, who pinched his cheeks until they were red.[5][7][8] These relatives, like Sendak’s parents, were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, whose remaining family in Europe were killed during the Holocaust while Sendak was in his early teens. As a child, however, he saw them only as “grotesques”.[8]

When working on the 1983 opera adaptation of the book with Oliver Knussen, Sendak gave the monsters the names of his relatives: Tzippy, Moishe, Aaron, Emile, and Bernard.[9]

Literary Significance

According to Sendak, at first, the book was banned in libraries and received negative reviews. It took about two years for librarians and teachers to realize that children were flocking to the book, checking it out over and over again, and for critics to relax their views.[10] Since then, it has received high critical acclaim. Francis Spufford suggests that the book is “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate and beautiful use of the psychoanalytic story of anger“.[11] Mary Pols of Time magazine wrote that “[w]hat makes Sendak’s book so compelling is its grounding effect: Max has a tantrum and in a flight of fancy visits his wild side, but he is pulled back by a belief in parental love to a supper ‘still hot,’ balancing the seesaw of fear and comfort.”[12] New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis noted that “there are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination.”[13] In Selma G. Lanes’s book The Art of Maurice Sendak, Sendak discusses Where the Wild Things Are along with his other books In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There as a sort of trilogy centered on children’s growth, survival, change, and fury.[14][15] He indicated that the three books are “all variations on the same theme: how children master various feelings – danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy – and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives.”[14]

Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children”.[16] Five years later School Library Journalsponsored a survey of readers which identified Where the Wild Things Are as top picture book.[4] Elizabeth Bird, the NYPL librarian who conducted the survey, observed that there was little doubt it would be voted number one and highlighted its designation by one reader as a watershed, “ushering in the modern age of picture books”. Another called it “perfectly crafted, perfectly illustrated … simply the epitome of a picture book” and noted that Sendak “rises above the rest in part because he is subversive”. President Barack Obama has read it aloud for children attending the White House Easter Egg Roll in multiple years.[17]

Despite the book’s popularity, Sendak refused to produce a sequel; four months before his death in 2012, he told comedian Stephen Colbert that one would be “the most boring idea imaginable”.[18]

COMMON SENSE SAYS:

Classic all-ages masterpiece has a wild imagination.

WHAT PARENTS NEED TO KNOW

Parents need to know that Maurice Sendak‘s Where the Wild Things Are is a classic of children’s literature. Although Max misbehaves, the message is one of parental love. This subtle masterpiece of story, writing, and art will have kids asking for repeated readings. Colorful language and a world of imagination make this wild adventure a fun learning experience.

WHAT’S THE STORY?

Wild child Max gets sent to bed without his supper after threatening to eat his mom. Well, he’ll show her, right? In his room — or, at least, in his mind — a forest grows. Max boards a ship that takes him across oceans and days to the home of the wild things, which threaten him with snarls and claws and eye-rolling. Does this frighten our little wolf-boy? Of course not! Max hypnotizes the monsters, who declare him the most wild thing of all. Max joins in on the fun but quickly bores of the new adventure and sails back home — to find supper in his room, still hot!

IS IT ANY GOOD?

This wonderful book is arguably Sendak’s best work — and one of the true classics of children’s literature. Perhaps the most appealing element is the wordless series of illustrations in which, after Max begins the “wild rumpus,” he and his new friends dance and cavort through six pages of some of the most whimsical, enchanting, and unique artwork in children’s literature. The message of unconditional parental love is reassuring to young ones and a perfect ending to the story.

There’s a reason why this won the Caldecott Medal. Sendak’s giant monster characters are iconic. While they are described as scary in the book, their faces and lumbering frames make them appear almost jovial. You can almost feel the room shake when you watch them cavort in the forest. Max and his new friends dance and cavort through six pages of some of the most whimsical, enchanting, and unique artwork in children’s literature.

TALK TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT …

  • Families can talk about Max’s behavior. Why does Max act the way he does?
  • If he loves adventure so much, why does he go back home to his parents?
  • Which is your favorite of Max’s monster friends?

BOOK DETAILS