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  • Children's Books by Famous Writers for Adults*
  • Marilyn Apseloff (bio)

It is unfortunate that Children's Literature is not sufficiently understood or appreciated by scholars. Perhaps one way to illuminate their darkness is to point out that many of the famous figures that scholars discuss in their teaching and writing have found stimulation and satisfaction in the challenge of writing for children as well as adults. This essay deals principally with the children's books of five celebrated twentieth-century writers: Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Arthur Miller, William Faulkner, and E. E. Cummings.

Some of these authors, it is true, wrote only one book and that for a particular child, as Aldous Huxley did with The Crows of Pearblossom, written in 1944 as a gift for his niece. Some books in this category were obviously not intended for publication, but were published posthumously: thus we have E. E. Cummings' Fairy Tales "written for Cummings' daughter, Nancy, when she was a very little girl";1 The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce, a picture book made from a letter Joyce wrote to his grandson, Stevie, from Villers-sur-mer in Calvados in August, 1936;2 and The Wishing Tree by William Faulkner, February, 1927, made available by Victoria Fielden, to whom that particular version was given.3 Playwright Arthur Miller has also tried his hand at writing a children's book: the result was Jane's Blanket, recently reissued by Viking.

C. S. Lewis has created the fantasy land of Narnia in the seven books that make up that series, the last one winning for him the Carnegie Medal for the best-written children's book of 1957. About children's books he said:

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty . . . the only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.4

He further states that "a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last."5

Robert Graves has produced both poetry and prose for children, among them The Big Green Book, perhaps his most amusing contribution, delightfully illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Novelist Graham Greene wrote four adventure stories for children;6 it was his belief that:

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. . . . in childhood all books are books of divination, telling [End Page 130] us about the future. . . . What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and revelation in those first fourteen years?7

John Masefield, a Poet Laureate of England, wrote several books of fantasy and adventure. "He has that final gift of a good story-teller," his biographer, Margery Fisher, remarks: "he makes each of his readers feel that a story is being read to him, and to him alone, at the moment of reading. Timing, the choice of incident, the peculiar, special Masefield dialogue, the immediacy of the scene—all these things help to make his novels compelling." What the reader should keep in mind with all well-written children's books is what she has said about Masefield's fantasies The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights:

These fantasies are not to be reserved for children. . . . Written with the full strength of Masefield's imagination and artistry, they are stories that summon up the child and the poet in everyone.8

The list of prominent literary figures who have written for children is impressive and long—from the Russian writers (Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov), to the French (Colette, Eugene Ionesco, Marcel Aymé), to contemporary Americans (John Ciardi, Randall Jarrell, Gwendolyn Brooks). Herein is a look at what five of them have accomplished. The books selected for this study are occasional ones; that is, they were written for a particular child rather than for a larger audience. However, that should not mean that they are then automatically of inferior literary merit because they were not originally intended for publication: the quality of Alice's Adventures Underground should dispel...

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