Some Remarks on Raggedy Ann and Johnny Gruelle

Raggedy Ann is found everywhere: in card shops, doll shops, dime stores, bookstores. There are some twenty books in print, from the original Raggedy Ann series. Yet, if you look in any standard reference volume, you will find no entry on her or her author, Johnny Gruelle, dead since 1938. He was not even in Who's Who.

Johnny Gruelle was a hack. Or, to put it more politely, he was a prolific author and illustrator. He turned out a mound of children's stories, illustrated books, comic strips, drawings. He even illustrated an ambitious edition of the Grimm Brothers, very handsome stuff considering it was done by a self-taught illustrator.

Now if a man is that prolific, if he writes so many books in a series, and other material as well, one is apt to view his work with suspicion. His writing couldn't be very good if there's that much of it. And generally speaking, much of Gruelle's writing isn't good. But the interesting thing to me is that the best of Gruelle is very good indeed, and unique, as far as I know, in children's literature.

Probably I do not need to say that some hacks write well on occasion. Robert Greene, the Elizabethan playwright, might be considered a hack, but he is still read, and some of his plays are very good. Daniel Defoe is the standard example of a hack whose best work is still read. Here in America, we have the example of another children's author, the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz. L. Frank Baum wrote an incredible amount of material, under various pseudonyms, some male and some female, in addition to some fourteen books about Oz. We are only beginning to acknowledge that Baum was a very good writer and that some of his books are really excellent—say, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, or Tik Tok of Oz, or even better, a non-Oz book called Queen Zixi of Ix, which I sometimes think is the best American children's story ever written.

The problem with people who are prolific is that one has to read all in order to find any real good works. One has to sift, examine, and look at all, and that's not necessarily easy. I don't mean to say that I've done something terribly hard in reading Gruelle, but I have read a great deal of him, including all the Raggedy Ann books, and I have come to certain conclusions about him.

Biographically, from what I can discover from talking to a few people, and from looking Gruelle up in the few places where one can look him up, this very talented, very prolific man was a born innocent. It seems that he went through most of his life, almost until the end, without a moral problem to his name. He was kind to everybody simply because it didn't occur to him to be any other way. He was never tempted to be rude or mean. And it is that kind of moral innocence which is both the virtue and the limitation of his writing.

Johnny Gruelle was born in Arcalo, Illinois, in 1880, but he was raised in Indianapolis. His father, Richard B. Gruelle, was a self-taught painter, well-known in the Middlewest for his landscapes. I think the American Middlewest, its ways, and its language are very much present in the Raggedy Ann books. If you want to find out attitudes and speech patterns of people of that time, I think you'll discover a lot of them in Raggedy Ann.

Gruelle and his brother Justin and sister Prudence apparently had healthy, somewhat casual upbringings. The father seemed to have let his children come and go pretty much as they wanted to, within reason. But they were all brought up with the idea of the importance of art with a little "a," rather than of a refined, somewhat snobbish thing called Art, with a capital "A." If one drew and painted, one produced art—whether it was editorial...