After floating through a series of design jobs at department stores and magazines, Crockett Johnson became an editorial cartoonist and then, in 1936, art editor for New Masses. Nel does an excellent job tracing Johnson and Krauss from their roots-hers as a second-generation American in middle-class Jewish Baltimore his in newly built Corona, Queens, where his Shetland Islands-born father and German-born mother settled-and following them through their long and varied careers as writers and artists. The relationship between these facts is of no small consequence. And what’s more, they exemplify rank-and-file participation in the array of left movements centered on the Communist Party from the 1930s to the ‘50s. They did, however, transform children’s literature. Pay no attention to the bulk of the subtitle: Krauss and Johnson’s marriage hardly seems unlikely, and they eluded the FBI mainly by virtue of never having been specific targets of the Red Scare. While the subjects of his latest book, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature, are not exactly obscure-Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig, and their collaboration The Carrot Seed (among many others) remain perennial favorites-their politics have been largely ignored. Seuss, and keeper of the Crockett Johnson Homepage ()-has devoted himself to rescuing twentieth-century radical children’s literature and its authors from relative oblivion. Mickenberg, of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, author of several books on Dr. What you might not have learned is that all these children’s books (and many other progressive favorites) were authored by one or the other or both members of a couple whose left politics inflected their work. If you did not, it is likely your friends and future comrades did.
You might have learned internationalism from The Big World and the Little House, or cultural relativism from Who’s Upside Down?, or freethinking and obstinacy from Barnaby.
If you did not read The Carrot Seed or Harold and the Purple Crayon, probably your children or your friends’ children did. “At least we can turn the book around,” said the little kangaroo. “Everything is upside down! And we can’t do a thing about it.”
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