Johnny We Hardly Knew Ya

New Criticism, which held sway in this country until recently, deemphasized the author by its assertion that the meaning of a literary work could not be discovered in its extratextual life or intentions. Fashionable rhetoric about the death of the author, which followed the New Criticism, also helped to discredit author-based studies. However, all this has done little to stem the longing of children—and adults, too, as Patricia Hall's book everywhere attests—to know the real person behind the books they have come to love. Literary biography continues to be a favorite category of childhood reading, and biographies of famous children's authors proliferate. In 1985, when I first started teaching children's literature in Indianapolis, I knew little about Johnny Gruelle and his creation. Since then, I have grown to love his stories. Largely through the efforts of students taking my courses, I have learned much about him, though a lot of that information has seemed contradictory and steeped in legend. For instance, an article in the Indianapolis Star (Sept. 8, 1985)—given to me by a student in my very first class—provides one version of the origins of Raggedy Ann, who was reportedly born in Indianapolis in 1914, while Gruelle was still working for the Star. Gruelle's only daughter, Marcella (then eight years old and suffering from tuberculosis), supposedly found this family doll in the attic, and the stories were Gruelle's way of making Marcella's long nights of coughing easier to bear. After her death, Gruelle was prompted by a Star staffer to write more of the stories; this led to their publication in 1918.

Most of the factual information provided in this version, however, is flatly contradicted or disproven by Patricia Hall's book. To begin, Hall's appendixes and narrative reveal that Gruelle had finished working for the Star by 1906. By 1910 he was living and working in Cleveland, and by 1914 he had moved to Silvermine, an artists' colony in Connecticut, and was freelancing for New York newspapers. Gruelle probably discovered the doll himself while visiting his parents in Indianapolis, and named it after two poems ("The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphan Annie") by James Whitcomb Riley, a friend of the elder Gruelle. Hall also records another account, that given by Myrtle, Gruelle's wife, in later years, which claims that when she and her husband and Marcella returned to Cleveland after that visit to Indianapolis, they took this family rag doll home with them, dressed in new clothes. Furthermore, Marcella was born in 1902, which would have made her twelve in the Star account, not eight. She did in fact die in 1915, at Silvermine, barely three months after her thirteenth birthday, but of complications arising from a bad vaccination (one of the most scathing documents that Hall reproduces is a bitter satirical cartoon about vaccination that Gruelle published in 1921), not from tuberculosis. The only point on which the two narratives converge is that Gruelle made up the stories, hoping to lift his little girl's spirits by incorporating her dolls and toys as characters.

Patricia Hall's book is so well researched that it will undoubtedly become the standard reference book on Gruelle. She takes great pleasure in presenting the true historical details of Gruelle's life and provides the reader with an extensive collection of pictures that document the major phases of Gruelle's career, from newspaper cartoonist to magazine illustrator and finally to book illustrator. One is surprised to discover how much the man accomplished during his thirty or so years of creative activity, which went far beyond creating perhaps the most beloved of all American folk-doll characters. Before rag dolls became popular, he designed several other characters and toys, including a humorous family of ducks. He was a respected political cartoonist and comic-strip artist as well, having created Brutus, a short cigar-chomping wise guy who managed to get himself into numerous scrapes (usually about lending or borrowing money) during the Depression...