Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the Fbi, and Transformed Children's Literature (Children's Literature Association) (Hardcover)

Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the Fbi, and Transformed Children's Literature (Children's Literature Association) By Philip Nel Cover Image
Email or call for price, this title will require additional shipping and handling in order for us to obtain it for you.

Description


Crockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk, 1906-1975) and Ruth Krauss (1901- 1993) were a husband-and-wife team that created such popular children's books as The Carrot Seed and How to Make an Earthquake. Separately, Johnson created the enduring children's classic Harold and the Purple Crayon and the groundbreaking comic strip Barnaby. Krauss wrote over a dozen children's books illustrated by others and pioneered the use of spontaneous, loose-tongued kids in children's literature. Together, Johnson and Krauss's style--whimsical writing, clear and minimalist drawing, and a child's point of view--is among the most revered and influential in children's literature and cartooning, inspiring the work of Maurice Sendak, Charles M. Schulz, Chris Van Allsburg, and Jon Scieszka. This critical biography examines their lives and careers, including their separate achievements when not collaborating. Using correspondence, sketches, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, archived and personal interviews, author Philip Nel draws a compelling portrait of a couple whose output encompassed children's literature, comics, graphic design, and the fine arts. Their mentorship of nowfamous illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) is examined at length, as is the couple's appeal to adult contemporaries such as Duke Ellington and Dorothy Parker. Defiantly leftist in an era of McCarthyism and Cold War paranoia, Johnson and Krauss risked collaborations that often contained subtly rendered liberal themes. Indeed, they were under FBI surveillance for years. Their legacy of considerable success invites readers to dream and to imagine, drawing paths that take them anywhere they want to go.

About the Author


Philip Nel is assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. He is author of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide. He has been published in Children's Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.


Product Details
ISBN: 9781617036248
ISBN-10: 1617036242
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Publication Date: July 30th, 2012
Pages: 368
Language: English
Series: Children's Literature Association

All Special Orders, Author Events Admission Packages and Author Autographed Book Sales are final and nonrefundable at time of purchase, all other Sales are exchangeable / refundable within 30 Days with Receipt.