nostalgic. Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family (1965) is a haunting and trim and
archetypal story, a Kiplingesque tale of humans and animals living in adopted families.
Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child (1967) is a horse of a different colour: a
fantasy that is also an existential fable for children and adults, a story of refugee
animals whose no-exit lives are occasionally made efflorescent by unexpected epiphanies
and episodes of hope.
But novels only compose one category. We can turn to another genre, the picture book,
to witness an equally incredible efflorescence. Certainly one of America’s most
remarkable productions of this kind is Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats (1928), the work of
an artist born of Eastern European immigrants and a story that tells of an elderly couple
inundated with feline émigrés. What was striking about Gag’s book was its advanced
compositional techniques and its moderne style; here was the Museum of Modern Art
between the covers of a children’s book.
Another example of this modernity might be seen in the work of yet another (Austrian)
immigrant to the US A, in Ludwig Bemelman’s Picasso-like sketches for his Madeline
books (1939 et seq.). Madeline, of course, is a resident of Paris and, for a time, it seemed
the best of American picture books were imbued with a certain European flavour. To be
sure, between the wars, Europe was all the rage in certain artistic circles; Ernest
Hemingway was only the most conspicuous of Americans who saw themselves as
writers-in-residence in (variously) Paris, London, Spain, Italy, Gstaad, and elsewhere.
But unlike Hemingway’s ambulance-chasing novels, the glories of war were not
celebrated in children’s books; in Robert Lawson’s The Story of Ferdinand, published at
the outset of the Spanish Civil War (1936), the hero is a Spanish bull who is a pacifist.
A picture book published the next year (1937) set a new course for the genre. Dr
Seuss’s And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street brought jangling verse and a new kind of
incantatory musicality to this otherwise visual medium. Like this is another
extraordinary and kinetic book: Margaret Wise Brown’s playful Goodnight Moon (1947).
Some years later—but still two years before Ginsberg’s Howl and one year before
Kerouac’s On the Road and Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind—Dr Seuss published
The Cat in the Hat (1957) and introduced one of America’s hippest pranksters.
A third stage of development of the picture book occurred in 1963 when Maurice
Sendak took forward this incantatory musicality and added a new psychological
dimension—in his story of Max’s struggles with parental demons in Where the Wild
Things Are. This kind of psychological depth and insight would characterise Sendak’s
subsequent and brilliant work. It would also characterise the work of many other gifted
artists—for example, William Steig, especially in his 1969 Sylvester and the Magic
Pebble.
Of course, it is impossible to cast a net (however wide) around the whole twentieth
century. Works and authors easily slip through; mention should be made, for example,
of Madeline L’Engle’s science-fiction series that began with A Wrinkle in Time (1962) and
of the unrecognised genius behind D.Manus Pinkwater’s whimsical novels. Even so,
time will point out (and later generations will lament) our short-sightedness in not
recognising other contemporary authors whose genius will, subsequently, be so
manifest. Then, too, despite the size of our nets, entire seas have gone unfished in this
short essay; to mention just one: in 1937 Walt Disney released his best-known animated
868 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE