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163 18 New Adventures on Page and Screen And, if they weren’t exactly in their right order, none of them complained. —Crockett Johnson, Harold at the North Pole (1958) As she considered pursuing new directions, Ruth Krauss still had to earn a living. To find ideas for her children’s books, she continued to do what had worked in the past—visiting the Rowayton Kindergarten and the Community Cooperative Nursery School. Even though they knew she was older, children accepted her as one of them. If Krauss wondered what the children were discussing , she would ask. They were happy to answer and to let her take notes.1 By the first few months of 1957, Krauss had gathered enough of their stories to show Ursula Nordstrom. In April, the two women began debating which ones to include in a new book. Nordstrom liked “The Happy Egg” so much that she thought it “could make a tiny little book by itself! . . . 2 year olds would love it.”However,“The Mish-Mosh Family,”a story about a“whole family inside of a child,” should go. They eventually settled on seventeen tales, and Maurice Sendak began creating drawings for each. Marking a change in Sendak and Krauss’s collaborative style, the layout was uncharacteristically straightforward—the text on each left-hand page, the illustrations on each right-hand page. By late July, Sendak had finished his pictures, and he and Krauss had had settled on a title, Somebody Else’s Nut Tree, after the book’s final story, in which a child finds and adopts a pretty little nut tree, only to learn that it is not hers. That tale’s sudden shift in perspective underscores the book’s major theme—transformations.2 During the summer and fall of 1957, two major changes came to Ruth and Dave’s social circle. First, on 21 July, Simon and Schuster editor Jack Goodman died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-eight. Once central to the social life of Rowayton’s artistic community, the Goodmans’ parties came to an end. Then, Phyllis Rowand remarried. Her new husband was Sidney Landau, the cofounder of Mayles Textiles, and he legally adopted Nina Rowand 164 New Adventures on Page and Screen Wallace, joining his new family as a regular dinner guest at the JohnsonKrauss house.3 Published in the fall of 1957, Krauss and Rowand’s Monkey Day met a mixed reception. Library Journal thought it“cluttered” and“in poor taste” and marked it “Not recommended.” The New York Times Book Review’s George Woods called it “a silly, excessive story of monkey-cult devotion.” Other reviewers , however, thought Monkey Day classic Krauss. “Again it seems that Ruth Krauss has built a simple little phrase into a series of happenings that very little children will savor with delight,”wrote the New York Herald Tribune Book Review’s Margaret Libby.4 The fall of 1957 also saw the publication of Harold’s Trip to the Sky, in which Harold rides a rocket, overshoots the moon, and meets an alien “thing.” As Barbara Bader suggests, Harold’s Trip to the Sky can be read as a dramatization of the “fears of the Fifties”:“To Jung and others, the widespread sighting of UFO’s at the time stemmed from fear of nuclear destruction, and the whole of Harold’s Trip to the Sky can be seen as an expression of [these] anxieties, absorbed and transformed.” Contemporary reviewers, however, noted no political subtext and praised Harold’s Trip to the Sky as“just as funny and unexpected as ever,” in the words of the New York Times’s Ellen Lewis Buell. Booklist alleged that “some of the concepts may be too advanced for the youngest of Harold’s usual audience” but ultimately praised Harold’s Trip to the Sky as “good fun for kindergarten-age space travelers.”5 October 1957 also saw Harold take a journey to the big screen in David Piel’s film version of Harold and the Purple Crayon, narrated by Norman Rose. Johnson urged Harper to be prepared to capitalize on the movie’s imminent release. For the past year, he had been concerned that the publisher was not keeping the Harold books in stores—half a dozen people had told him that they could not find Purple Crayon—and that sales were lost as a result. The movie was due in theaters before Christmas, and he thought Harold would “get quite a bit of...

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