Life Drawings: Some Notes on Children's Picture Book Biographies

The writing and illustration of biographies for children is most often an attempt at praise. Folk heroes like Johnny Appleseed and Joan of Arc, and inventors and statesmen like Benjamin Franklin recur in the lists, which change constantly with shifts in social awareness: many more children's biographies of women, black people, and American Indians have, for instance, appeared in the last few years than ever before. Infamous people do not receive attention, usually, except as moral foils. The psychology of evil—psychology as such—is not the underlying concern of most biographies for children. Rather, the central character's life in children's biographies is often offered as an exemplum, as a model for the child. Young George Washington, little readers have been told again and again, chopped down a cherry tree but never, never told a lie.

From some accounts of Washington's youthful misadventure, one might almost get the impression that the future father of his country felled the tree for the express purpose of reciting the truth about his deed later. Some biographers, intent on their moral, have reduced their subject's life to an implausible ideal, an image of ghostly perfection quite literally too good to be true. But other picture book writers (and their illustrators) have avoided this apparent temptation to portray a memorable life as a kind of forced march to moral achievement and worldly success. Young Patrick Henry, for instance, in Jean Fritz's Where Was Patrick Henry On the 29th of May?, illustrated by Margot Tomes, was "no scholar," and in fact, as a boy, the great orator-to-be "didn't seem to have any particularly useful talents."1 Henry enjoyed a certain period of irresponsibility before turning into a working adult. He had the opportunity to be a child.

A biographer's praise, then, may take a variety of turns: it may focus on the uneventful and not especially promising times of a life as well as on the prophetic moments and recognized accomplishments. Praise that consists of a celebration of the ordinary details of experience remains more rare as a feature of biographies for children than of those written for the rest of us. Nonetheless, Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, who published the first of their celebrated children's picture book biography series in the 1930s, managed to include such material, traveling as part of their research to many of the places their subjects—Washington, Columbus, Leif Erikson, and others—had lived, sketching and recording many small impressions of sight, odor, and sound for a documentation grounded in the immediacy of the senses as well as in objective historical fact.2 Thus in their biography of Christopher Columbus, they write: "the water [off Haiti] was so clear and seemed so safe that Columbus relaxed his watch and lay down to rest." When the Washington family (George having just become old enough to begin school) set out by carriage for a new home, "every now and then the wheels stuck in a mudhole, or a rotten tree fell straight across the road. The horses jumped over the tree and quite forgot that the carriage could not jump too...." As a boy, George and the other Washington children sat around the fireplace each evening, listening to their mother tell Bible stories. "On the shiny tiles of the fireplace there were painted pictures of the stories she told. Thus George learned his Bible," the authors conclude, turning a precise bit of observation into the lead-in to a moral lesson of their own, "and he learned to be good and honest and never tell a lie." The human Washington turns to bronze—or stone.

The d'Aulaires do not recount the cherry tree anecdote, which is probably apocryphal. But they leave the thoughtful reader to wonder how, for instance, to reconcile their comment that the grown Washington's "hundreds of slaves and servants kept everything spick and span and in beautiful order" with their absolute faith in his goodness. An unquestioning determination to offer a moral example even when the facts (and complex...