time, Melcher established the Newbery Medal for the best children’s book of the
preceding year, inaugurating with the first winner, The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van
Loon, an award with both literary and commercial weight. Other influential editors
starting their careers in this period included Virginia Kirkus at Harper Brothers in 1926
and Elisabeth Bevier (later Hamilton) at Harcourt, Brace in 1928. The new books that they
produced were enthusiastically supported by children’s librarians, so much so that such
a preeminent journal of criticism as The Horn Book Magazine devoted its August 1928
issue to an appreciation of Seaman’s editorship, giving fourteen editorial pages to a
reproduction of her autumn catalogue. Truly, editors and librarians seemed to have
entered into what some in retrospect call ‘a benign conspiracy’.
The first setback to these years of steady growth came in 1932 with the onset of the
great depression. As managements trimmed staff in response to hard times, Massee
apparently was let go at Doubleday, relocating soon after at Viking where she organised
a new department. Kirkus also left Harper when it merged its juvenile department into
the general trade department, ironically the year after she acquired Little House in the
Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, an all-time bestseller for the company. Nevertheless,
fifteen children’s book departments remained in place and growth resumed shortly, with
more companies deciding to compete in the juvenile market as trained personnel
became available.
By 1938, output of new children’s books had more than doubled since Seaman’s early
days, reaching a total of 1,041 titles, and both reviewers and buyers were beginning to
complain about overproduction. In the same year, Frederic Melcher instituted the
Caldecott Medal for the best picture book of the preceding year, thus giving official
recognition to the art of illustration and to the illustrator as a key member of the team
creating the picture book. Because of the interest of Massee and other editors in the
graphics of their books, a number of gifted artists arriving from Europe were finding an
outlet for their work in American children’s books and producing landmark titles. One of
these artists was the prolific Kurt Wiese, who is remembered for his visual interpretation
of many enduring stories, including the classic The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire
Huchet Bishop. But home-grown talent was developing as well, for the year before, in
1937, Dr Seuss burst upon the scene with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street
on the Vanguard list, selling 31,600 copies in six years, and the picture book was never
quite the same again. Another distinctively American artist to emerge was Glen Rounds,
whose 1936 debut title Ol’Paul, The Mighty Logger is credited by publisher Vernon Ives
with single-handedly saving his year-old company Holiday House from an early demise.
Two schools of thought on the most appropriate content for children’s books were
taking shape during this period, and each was often highly critical of the other. Some
called this differing point of view the ‘milk bottles versus Grimm’ controversy, as it
seemed to pit proponents of everyday realistic material against those of the fantastical
themes found in more traditional storytelling. Lucy Sprague Mitchell of the Bank Street
College of Education, whose staff was working directly with children and reading in her
Writers Laboratory, pressed hard for what she called the ‘Here and Now’ in children’s
books. But Anne Carroll Moore, still a critical arbiter of great influence, found many of
the stories coming out of this programme prosaic and uninspiring, including Margaret
Wise Brown’s beloved Goodnight Moon whose appeal for very young children was
THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 473