Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Every year, just a moment before Christmas, millions of Americans named Uncle George race into a book store on their only trip of the year.

  “I want a book,” they tell the salesman, “that my nephew Orlo can read. He’s in the first grade. Wants to be a rhinosaurus hunter.”

  “Sorry,” said the salesman. “We have nothing about rhinosauri that Orlo could possibly read.”

  “OK,” say the millions of Uncle Georges. “Gimme something he can read about some other kind of animal.”

  And on Christmas morning, under millions of Christmas trees, millions of Orlos unwrap millions of books. . . all of them titled, approximately, Bunny, Bunny, Bunny.

  This causes the rhinosaurus hunters to snort, “Books stink!”

  — Dr. Seuss, “How Orlo Got His Book”

  You must tell the truth about a subject to a child as well as you are able, without any mitigating of that truth. You must allow that children are small, courageous people who deal every day with a multitude of problems, just as adults do, and that they are unprepared for most things. What they yearn for most is a bit of truth somewhere.

  — Maurice Sendak

  Wild Things!

  Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature

  “There Should Not Be Any ‘Should’ in Art”

  Subversive Children’s Literature

  BEHIND-THE-SCENES INTERLUDE

  Scandalous Mysteries and Mysterious Scandals

  GLBT and Literature for Youth

  How Far We’ve Come

  Banning on Their Minds

  BEHIND-THE-SCENES INTERLUDE

  Some Hidden Delights of Children’s Literature

  Kids Love ’Em, Critics Hate ’Em

  . . . and Vice Versa

  And to Think That I Saw It on Hollywood Boulevard

  The Celebrity Children’s Book Craze

  BEHIND-THE-SCENES INTERLUDE

  Sex and Death

  From Mainstream to Wall Street

  Children’s Books in a Post-Potter World

  SOURCE NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHY AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  AUTHORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There’s a perception out there, among the “real” writers (i.e., for adults) that writing for kids is not serious business — that the writing is fluffy, easy, sentimental. I wish I could say those perceptions are completely wrong, but they’re only partially wrong. Many kids’ books are over-sugared and simplistic in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It’s something our culture looks for and craves, an attitude about kids that is overprotective and Disney-fied. . . . Knowing my friends might think I was writing Bunny FooFoo stuff or Mumsie Wuvs Me stuff — and going ahead anyway. . . . That [takes] courage.

  — author and poet Julie Larios

  One spring morning, Robert Lawson looked out the window and saw a fluffy bunny sitting on the lawn staring intently at his office window. Ever since the author-illustrator had written the manuscript Rabbit Hill, that little bunny had appeared on the lawn every time good news was in store. He arrived the day the book was accepted for publication and returned whenever Mr. Lawson got a good review or a royalty check. Now he was back again, perhaps with more good news. When the author mentioned this to his wife, Marie Lawson responded that she doubted the week could get any better.

  The next day, Rabbit Hill won the 1945 Newbery Medal for the year’s “most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature.”

  Fast-forward sixty-something years. Neil Gaiman has just won the 2009 Newbery for The Graveyard Book. This time fluffy bunnies don’t gather in anticipation of the big announcement. Instead, Gaiman himself reveals the news to fans via Twitter: “FUCK! I won the FUCKING NEWBERY. THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME.”

  And some say the world of children’s books never changes.

  Certainly the oeuvre has changed since 1883, when a popular work titled “About the Little Girl That Beat Her Sister” was published. Back then, a work of literature for children was considered a success if it fulfilled its purpose as a didactic, instructive book for impressionable youth, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, you are likely to encounter everything from gay penguins to naked babies to cannibalism.

  Indeed, children’s books may evolve more than any other literary genre. It’s the only one whose primary audience does a complete rollover in the time it takes to move from diapers to driver’s licenses. And each new generation of children comes to the bookshelves seeking stories that reflect their time, their society, their truths, their reality. Children’s literature has had to grow and change to meet those needs. The culture wars of the late 1960s led to the introduction of such topics as sex, drugs, and divorce, altering the landscape of children’s fiction forever. At other times, the changes have been more cosmetic, as when novels adopted the language of technology, such as instant messaging. Or when twenty-first-century concerns dictate new rules about what is acceptable for children to see and what is not. Take, for instance, decades of warnings from the surgeon general: For a 2005 newly revised edition of the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon, originally published in 1947, HarperCollins digitally removed a cigarette from the dust-jacket photo of illustrator Clement Hurd. “In the great green room, there is a telephone, and a red balloon, but no ashtray,” wrote the New York Times. The publisher did so with the permission of Thacher Hurd, Clement’s son and manager of Clement’s estate, but Thacher only hesitantly agreed: “I reluctantly allowed them to do it,” he said, adding that the new version of the picture “looks slightly absurd to me.”

  Goodnight, cigarette: Clement Hurd’s original jacket photograph and the retouched version

  Image Credit 1

  Sometimes a change can be superficial, while other times it just means acknowledging, at long last, some heretofore unspoken truths: Heather has two mommies. And everyone poops.

  One might argue that rather than accompany social change, children’s books have a way of preceding it. As you will see, everything from a simple tale of a bunny wedding (albeit a black bunny and a white bunny) to nonfiction featuring transgender children has been challenged over the years by adults not ready to accept new social norms.

  Books produced for children and teens today also reflect the changes in our current views of childhood. As literature for children has grown, it certainly has done so in tandem with changes in perceptions of parenting; children’s books are what British author and poet Michael Rosen calls “interventions in society’s debate about bringing up children.” Upon entering the twenty-first century, we’ve seen the rise of overly involved adults, sometimes labeled “helicopter parents.” In a 2012 interview with NPR, sociologist and professor Sherry Turkle spoke about contemporary children and teens being tethered to their parents, texting with them up to fifteen times a day, and no longer having the space and solitude in which to grow and experiment with their identities. At the New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski wrote about such anxious parental hovering and how it rears its head in contemporary picture books. He noted that the great theme here is steadfast parental affection, even in the face of lousy behavior, as well as a “new, psychologically attuned” earnestness to dealing with misbehavior in children: “Like the novel or the sitcom, the picture book records shifts in domestic life: newspaper-burrowing fathers have been replaced by eager, if bumbling, diaper-changers. Similarly, the stern disciplinarians of the past — in Robert McCloskey books, parents instruct children not to cry — have largely vanished.”

  Now more than ever do children themselves wish for books of escape where parents hold little power. As a result, books that have been read by generations of children, the so-called classics, seem to hold more sway than ever
. Many seem perpetually timely, particularly those containing spunky orphans with parents who are permanently out of the picture. The best books in the children’s literary canon contain something timeless alongside those pipe-smoking apes and spanked dolls (H. A. Rey’s Curious George and Dare Wright’s Lonely Doll, respectively).

  The one constant truth about children’s literature is the immense influence it has on its readers’ lives. One regularly hears adults speak fondly of picture books and novels their younger, impressionable selves read, books that have never been erased from their memories. Literature, writes children’s book author Julius Lester, is one way we enter the realm of the imaginative, and it enables us to put ourselves in another’s shoes and experience “other modes of being. Through literature, we recognize who we are and what we might become.”

  These are no small tasks, to say the very least.

  Who can forget the great sacrifice Charlotte made for her friend Wilbur and how “no one was with her when she died,” alone at the Fair Grounds after Templeton walked off with her egg sac? Who can forget Max’s post-rumpus bowl of hot soup, even after he boldly gave his mother some serious how-to and what-for? Who remembers crying (where did we put our tissues, anyway?) when we found out that Leslie went to Terabithia alone and the rope taking her over the rain-swollen creek broke? Many young adults of today remember growing up with Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron, living and breathing the books since 1997. Facing the end of an era with the seventh Harry Potter book, they reluctantly said farewell, knowing that Harry remains forever in the pages of their books for rereading time and again.

  Essentially, childhood may very well constitute the most significant years of anyone’s life and is filled with raw, unfiltered emotions one never forgets. Children, says picture-book author Lauren Thompson, are the most important audience that a writer could hope to reach. If children don’t have good books to love from an early age, she asks, how will they grow up to love books as adults? Tony Kushner put it well in his 2003 tribute to Maurice Sendak: “Children’s literature makes us fall in love with books and we never recover — we’re doomed.” And with every doctor, librarian, and early-childhood educator telling us that childhood’s importance is without parallel, it is baffling to see their literature condescended to, romanticized, and generally misunderstood.

  It’s true. We see it all the time. We write about children’s books. And though we come from different backgrounds and live in diverse parts of the country, we have one thing in common: Nearly every day we hear, “Oh! You write about children’s books? I just love children’s books! They’re. . . so. . . so. . . sweet!”

  We’ve long wondered what causes so many adults — sophisticated, worldly, and even downright cynical adults — to get sloppy and sentimental at the mere mention of books for kids. It seems that for many, the topic conjures up a lost world of gumdrops, rainbows, and fluffy little bunnies that love you forever and like you for always. In an illustrated lecture he once gave at the University of Utah, Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) referred to these as “bunny-bunny books” or “the fuzzy, mysterious literature of the young.”

  Like Geisel, we’re not fans of this “fluffy bunny” mentality. Given that books for children are pivotal and immensely powerful in their emotional and cognitive lives, we believe that they should be the very best. Childhood is not a phase to be disregarded; the same should be said of the books children read. They deserve well-crafted tales from the people who have the talent to write and illustrate them and who take their craft seriously. Do they need heavy-handed sermons from the latest celebrity “It” girl’s newest children’s book? Not so much.

  And if we think we get an overdose of the cute-and-fluffies when people discover that we write about children’s books, what about the authors and illustrators who create them? “So you only write children’s books? Have you written any real books?” one author-illustrator was asked at a party. And if that sounds like an unusual question, it’s not. Another illustrator, who told us this topic almost seems downright taboo, said, “People seem to have an unrealistic expectation of artists, writers, and those involved with the production of work for children: creators must themselves be well-behaved children.” It’s a mentality that causes novelist Kathi Appelt to admit that, when she tells people she is a children’s author, she expects to be patted on the head, as if being told, Aw, isn’t that sweet? It’s the odd notion, the great James Marshall once said, that children expect children’s book authors to look like hippopotamuses, and adults assume that, by virtue of their profession, they are going to be eccentric or goofy. Author-illustrator Elisha Cooper believes these perceptions are all nonsense and that, in reality, “children’s book authors seem to be a solitary, neurotic, and unhygienic bunch (which, hell, probably describes me, though I hope I am hygienic).”

  And it’s the same mentality that left the late Maurice Sendak longing for “a time when people didn’t think of children’s books as a minor art form, a little Peterpanville, a cutesy-darling place.” In a 2011 Vanity Fair portrait, he raged over a stranger approaching him and condescendingly referring to him as an author of “kiddie” books. It seems that just about any profession that deals with childhood is often condescended to, whether it’s teaching in an elementary school, working in a day-care program, or children’s librarianship.

  With this book we hope to dispel the romanticized image of children’s literature, held by much of the public, of children’s authors writing dainty, instructive stories with a quill pen in hand and woodland creatures curled up at their feet. This stereotype lives on, even today, when nearly every experience or philosophy can be explored in the pages of a book for a child. Sure, some children’s literature is old-fashioned and didactic, but much is subversive, thought-provoking, and life-changing. Some books overturn adult pretensions and defy social laws. Some make children conscious, as scholar Perry Nodelman writes, of more than one way to be normal, empowering children to think critically about what the status quo says our values should be. And some threaten to undermine adults’ absolute authority over children. Even children’s responses to books can take that authority and turn it on its head.

  Sure, that bunny might be cute and fluffy, but look closely: Much like General Woundwort in the midst of a warren war — or even uptight Rabbit when his garden in the Hundred Acre Wood has been messed with — he’s not the harmless little creature you thought. He’s got big, sharp, pointy teeth and a vicious streak a mile wide.

  We’d like to share stories about books and their creators that defy this condescending mentality surrounding children’s lit. (For one, it’s really OK if Neil Gaiman — gasp! — swears. He is an adult, after all, talking to other adults.) We will take an occasionally irreverent, but always affectionate, look at the world of children’s books — glancing back at some of its early creators, exploring the great twentieth-century works that most of us grew up on, and noting how this once niche market has, since the turn of the new century, achieved mainstream interest and appeal. We’ll examine the history of subversive books (sometimes it’s all about who gets to eat and who gets eaten); tip our hats to the gay and lesbian authors and illustrators who have made great contributions to the field of children’s literature; and take a look at banned books and descriptions of stories that were quietly changed after publication to remove offensive stereotypes. We look at the history of so-called gatekeeping in children’s literature, as well as try to make sense of the celebrity children’s book phenomenon.

  We are American librarians and bloggers who culled many of our stories from our day-to-day work. This means primarily stories about American books and their creators, but we also touch upon some European (mostly British) books and creators as well. We have included stories we have read over the years in various sources, and we did original research as well, talking to many authors and illustrators working in children’s and young adult literature today. We cover lots of picture books — those delightful “acts of mischief,” as you
will read later — as well as middle-grade and young adult novels.

  Along the way, we will take some breaks to uncover a few literary mysteries (did Laura Ingalls cross paths with a band of mass murderers?), deliver the scoop on nasty little things that cagey writers have slipped right past their editors, and tell you which author committed matricide — with a fork!

  Together we are librarians and catalogers, bloggers and speakers, parents and scholars. We inhabit the world of children’s books and know them so well that at least one of us dedicated the better part of his life to them. It is with great sadness that we note here that, during the creation of this book, we lost friend and co-author Peter D. Sieruta. After turning in the final pages, Peter unexpectedly passed away at his home.

  Peter was a true scholar of children’s literature with an infectious passion for children’s books, particularly young adult literature. It was through his blog that this generally reclusive and private man reached out to an audience of fellow children’s literature enthusiasts to share his passion for books and entertain with well-researched stories — both obscure and otherwise — behind older and contemporary children’s and YA novels.

  It was our distinct pleasure to work and write with Peter for three years. He had a keen wit, a kind heart, and a brilliant mind.

  Peter’s voice infuses every page of this book, and you will also occasionally see sidebar discussions among the three of us in which you can hear Peter’s voice directly.

  This book is for him.

  I recall my maternal grandparents giving me a book called Der Struwwelpeter. They beamed when I looked at the pages, but even at the age of seven, the thought that went through my head was, “What are you people, f’ing NUTS?!!”

  — author-illustrator Bob Staake