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153 17 Striking Out into New Areas of Experimentation You can write books about anything. —Ruth Krauss, “How to Write a Book,” in How to Make an Earthquake (1954) Though pleased by the swift sales and strong reviews of Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson viewed his success from a gently sardonic perspective. In November 1955, his clipping service sent him the WinstonSalem Journal and Sentinel’s single-sentence review by Dave Marion, age four: “Harold can draw whatever he wants with his purple crayon, and then it really is.” Bemused, he passed the clipping along to his editor:“Dear Ursula,” he wrote.“Just in case you missed this—It’s a very good review.”1 Ruth Krauss’s work was getting good reviews, too.An eight-page article in Elementary English proclaimed that she “has probably gone further than any other author in experimenting with the form and content of picture books.” Hailing her as at the vanguard of the “realistic ‘here and now’ type of story,” the piece attempted to define the Krauss aesthetic:“Children are neither cute darlings to be patronized, nor miniature adults to be civilized, but rather lively, well-organized people with . . . ambitions of their own” who“are fascinated by language” and “have an exuberance and joy in daily living, and an irrepressible sense of the ridiculous which may differ radically from an adult’s idea of what’s funny.” Singling out Krauss’s gifts as a poet, the essay’s author, Anne Martin, said that in A Very Special House, Krauss “has successfully depicted a world of riot, chaos, and confusion by employing a strictly disciplined, rhythmical , almost lyrical style in symmetrical form.” Martin wondered whether Krauss would “continue to work along the lines of I’ll Be You and You’ll Be Me, or perhaps strike out into completely new areas of experimentation.” For children,“a Ruth Krauss book‘is to look at’over and over again, to quote from and laugh at and talk about, and even (going along with Sendak’s illustrations) to hug lovingly and to drop off to sleep with.”2 154 Striking Out into New Areas of Experimentation Krauss continued to experiment. Charlotte and the White Horse, published in the fall of 1955, leaves behind the humor of her earlier child-authored stories . Unlike the playful nonsense of Bears, Charlotte’s verse is lyrical, with pictures that Maurice Sendak described as“my first attempt to unite poetry with William Blake.”As the seasons change the wind and the rains are gone the grass is coming out of the ground the leaves are coming out of the trees the people are coming out of doors. Though Krauss makes the poetic cadences visible, she also signals that the words come from one of her child acquaintances: the entire text is in quotation marks, with the opening mark appearing before the first word on the first page and the closing mark after the last word on the final page. There is a touch of sadness when the father suggests that Charlotte’s colt “won’t make a good race horse so we will sell him.”Krauss repeats twice,“Now just sorrow is coming in,” and Sendak shows the sad little girl, turning away, looking down. Her father relents, and girl and horse share a tearful embrace.3 Sustained by Sendak’s delicate watercolors, this tale of Charlotte and her colt, Milky Way, is one of the best-reviewed Krauss books. The Horn Book called it a “little book of unusual beauty,” the New York Times Book Review’s Lois Palmer thought that Krauss “has shown again how clearly she understands how children feel and what is important to them,”and the New Yorker’s Katharine T. Kinkead found “a guilelessness and spontaneity” reminiscent of “the actual conversation of an imaginative child.” Sendak’s“exquisite pictures” (as the Chicago Tribune described them) won critical approval, too. The Times thought the“soft tone”of his art apt, and Kinkead believed that“the softly colored illustrations” had“exactly caught” the“tenderness and exultation” of “the girl’s love song to her pet.” The New York Herald Tribune went even further, saying that Sendak’s “pictures match and surpass the tenderness of the text, giving it all a dreamlike fairy tale quality.”4 Both Nordstrom and Susan Carr liked the dummy for Harold’s Fairy Tale but suggested revisions. Nordstrom asked Johnson to change “(page 12) that business of making himself smaller and (page...

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