Philip Nel

Kansas State University | KSU · Department of English

In 1955, Dr. Seuss and William Spaulding—director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational division—stepped into the publisher’s elevator at 2 Park Street in Boston. As Seuss’s biographers tell us, the elevator operator was an elegant, petite woman who wore white gloves and a secret smile (Morgan and Morgan 154). They don’t mention that she was Annie Will...

Full text: http://iowareview.org/from-the-issue/volume-45-issue-2-%E2%80%94-fall-2015/manifesto-childrens-literature-or-reading-harold

In The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (2002), I took for granted that an avant-garde for children was both possible and critically viable. More recently (in “Surrealism for Children: Paradoxes and Possibilities,” 2015), I questioned what I had taken for granted. In this manifesto, I veer further away from the notion t...

In 1964, Gloria Nel (née Webb) arrived in England and began her 50-year career in computing at IBM in London (1964-1966). She continued as a programmer at the London Press Exchange (1966–1968), and then in the U.S. at MIT (1968–1969), followed by time as a self-employed educator (1979–1982), at Shore Country Day School (1982–1984), Choate Rosemary...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/16/breaking-up-with-racist-childrens-books/

Over the past decade, there has been a proliferation of exciting new work across many areas of children’s literature and culture. Mapping this vibrant scholarship, the Second Edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature presents original essays on essential terms and concepts in the field. Covering ideas from “Aesthetics” to “Voice,” an impressive...

The penultimate volume of the "the last great comic strip." The long-lost comic strip masterpiece by legendary children's book author Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Carrot Seed), collected in full and designed by graphic novelist and Barnaby superfan Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Volume Four collects the postwar years of 1948–...

Published on Oxford University Press Blog, 11 Feb. 2020: https://blog.oup.com/2020/02/how-to-diversify-the-classics-for-real/

Published in Public Books: https://www.publicbooks.org/trump-is-a-liar-tell-children-the-truth/

Migration, Refugees, Diaspora, Children's Literature

Introduction: Keywords for Children’s Literature and Education

Published on the Oxford University Press Blog, 19 Sept. 2017: https://blog.oup.com/2017/09/childrens-literature-race/

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Resolutions-for-a-New-Academic/241061

Published in The Horn Book, May-June 2017. https://www.hbook.com/?detailStory=laughter-and-resistance-humor-as-a-weapon-in-the-age-of-trump

Published in Public Books: http://www.publicbooks.org/refugee-stories-for-young-readers/

Published in The Comics Journal, 3 Aug. 2016: http://www.tcj.com/dancing-on-the-manhole-cover-the-genius-of-richard-thompson/

The long-lost comic strip masterpiece by legendary children’s book author Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Carrot Seed), collected in full and designed by graphic novelist and Barnaby superfan Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Volume Three collects the postwar years of 1946-1947, continuing five-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his Fairy...

Published in Inside Higher Ed, 12 Apr. 2016: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/04/12/armed-campuses-spell-demise-public-universities-essay

My June 2001 interview with Maurice Sendak.

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2015/08/19/essay-advice-academics-starting-their-careers

This chapter addresses what an avant-garde for children might look like, and what it might do. It is called “Surrealism for Children: Paradoxes and Possibilities” because the very notion of an avant-garde for children strikes the author as both paradoxical and not, and as both possible and impossible. In making this claim, the author argues with –...

Movements of wildly different political aspirations have long understood that if you want to change the world, you start with the children. In Free to Be … You and Me, second wave feminists embraced this idea, creating children’s songs and stories that are fun, pointed, and enduring. Its creators often claim that at the time, there were no feminist...

Volume 2 of legendary children’s book author (Harold and the Purple Crayon) Crockett Johnson’s long-lost comic-strip masterpiece collects 5-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his Fairy Godfather J.J. O’Malley’s 1944-1945 newspaper strip misadventures: designed by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). The long-lost comic strip masterpiece by Crock...

This article addresses why faculty members work so much. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/03/03/essay-why-faculty-members-work-so-much

Maurice Sendak was an artist who not only produced extraordinary art and memorable books but also expanded the range of children's literature, what it can portray. In doing so, he eagerly dealt with his own life, his anxieties and joys, and focused on the importance of art to a child's life.

Before authoring one of the most beloved children's book series of all time — Harold and the Purple Crayon — cartoonist Crockett Johnson created the comic strip Barnaby for over ten years (1942-1952). Its subtle ironies and playful allusions never won a broad following, but the adventures of 5-year-old Barnaby and his fairy godfather Jackeen J. O'M...

Note: This article is being published simultaneously in Nordic ChildLit Aesthetics/Barnelitterært forskningstidsskrift and Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research.

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...

Upon learning of Crockett Johnson’s lung cancer, Ruth Krauss fell into a state of collapse. At the end of the first week of February 1975, he checked in to Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut. He then underwent surgery at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to remove part of his lungs, but the operation’s ameliorative effects were temporary. The c...

In the 1920s, David Johnson Leisk sought employment in New York City, first as an assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department. At the age of twenty-one, he became the first art editor of Aviation, which later changed its name to Aviation Week. While he was receiving an on-the-job education in layout and design, Dave began taking typogra...

While Crockett Johnson and Charlotte Rosswaag were making friends with leftists in Greenwich Village in New York City, Ruth Krauss and Lionel White were living nearby, in the West Village. Ruth and Lionel’s early married life was a difficult one, and Ruth eventually divorced him when she discovered that he was seeing another woman, Anna Maher. She...

In a January 1959 letter, Ruth Krauss announced her newfound interest in poetry. In fact, she considered stopping writing children’s books in order to immerse herself in poetry. Meanwhile, Crockett Johnson remained immersed in an impressive array of projects. In October 1958, Ursula Nordstrom approached Johnson if he would be interested in writing...

In 1989, Ruth Krauss placed an ad looking for someone to rent Crockett Johnson’s studio in Westport. Joanna Czaderna, a Polish immigrant who was seven months pregnant at the time, responded. Czaderna and her husband, Janusz, became a part of the household, followed by their daughter, Bianca, who was born in December 1989. In Joanna Czaderna, Krauss...

Ruth Krauss was born on July 25, 1901, destined to be a future writer of children’s books. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Ruth Krauss grew up in a three-story frame house at 2137 Linden Avenue with her parents, Julius Leopold Krauss and Blanche Krauss, and paternal grandfather, Leopold Krauss. Ruth suffered from a variety of diseases in her c...

On October 20, 1906 in New York City, Mary Burg gave birth to a boy whom she and her husband, David Leisk, named David Johnson Leisk. The boy would later assume the name Crocket after a comic strip character called Davy Crockett. In 1934, he started signing his work Crockett Johnson. In his childhood, Dave was relentlessly creative. He drew picture...

In 1963, Ruth Krauss published one of her most important poems, “This Breast,” in the Wagner Literary Magazine. That same year, A Beautiful Day, the first of Krauss’s poem plays, made it to the stage at New York’s Pocket Theater. Crockett Johnson and Krauss soon got irritated by what they perceived to be Harper’s indifference toward reprinting Is T...

Only sixteen months after deciding to pursue painting, Crockett Johnson held his first exhibition, Abstractions of Abstractions: Schematic Paintings Deriving from Axioms and Theorems of Geometry, from Pythagoras to Apollonius of Perga, and from Desargues and Kepler to the Twentieth Century, at the Glezer Gallery in New York on April 5, 1967. While...

Upon turning seventy, Ruth Krauss knew that people would see her as old. So she changed her birth year from 1901 to 1911—a difference of ten years. When Krauss died two decades later, friends were shocked to learn that she was already in her nineties. She and Crockett Johnson also pondered changing their address, finding Rowayton much busier than w...

After Crockett Johnson died, Ruth Krauss struggled to live a life without him. She tried to cope, seeking a way forward. She decided to move out of their home and stayed with Dick and Betty Hahn in Baltimore. Krauss applied for a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she had the opportunity to work among fellow ar...

During the harsh 1947–1948 winter, Ruth Krauss came up with a 123-page manuscript that provided a glimpse into her and Crockett Johnson’s daily lives, their relationship, and her aspirations. The piece, entitled “Where Am I Going?” also reflected Krauss’s uncertainty about where her professional life was heading. She was not earning a living from w...

Once he got free from the daily obligation of writing and drawing Barnaby strips, Crockett Johnson focused on all his other Barnaby-related projects. The second issue of the Barnaby Quarterly was published in November 1945, followed by the third issue three months later. Johnson was also working on a third Barnaby book and contemplated on writing c...

On July 20, 1948, twelve Communist Party leaders, at least one of whom Crockett Johnson personally knew, were indicted by a federal grand jury under the Smith Act (the Alien and Registration Act of 1940). The Smith Act was President Harry S. Truman’s response to Republican accusations that Democrats were being soft on communism. Although Johnson su...

In the 1950s, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, as well as their friends and neighbors in Rowayton, Connecticut, were monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for their alleged ties to communists. Some, including Rockwell Kent and Joe Freeman, testified before Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Aft...

On June 25, 1943, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss got married in New London, Connecticut. In October of that year, Ruth received a contract from Harper for her first children’s book entitled A Good Man and His Good Wife. She followed it up with an anti-ageist children’s book, I’m Tired of Being a Grandma. Meanwhile, Crockett’s Barnaby comic strip...

In 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy came up with a list of fifty-seven State Department employees who were members of the American Communist Party. By the end of April, Crockett Johnson was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York Division as one of “400 concealed Communists.” Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss’s social circle inc...

In November 1954, Crockett Johnson finished dummies for Harold and the Purple Crayon. In December 1954, he received a $750 advance and a contract from Harper for the publication of the book. That very same day, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New Haven office asked director J. Edgar Hoover for “Bureau authority” to interview Johnson, citing t...

From a creative standpoint, 1958 began auspiciously for Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson. While she was working on a book based on the artwork she had collected from children at the Rowayton public schools in Connecticut over the past six years, he was writing three new stories, including Ellen’s Lion, and rewriting another, The Frowning Prince, wh...

The success of his comic strip Barnaby brought Crockett Johnson financial security, not to mention more work. People wrote to request original strips or to reprint the comics. Editors used Barnaby to illustrate concepts, and the American Statistical Association Bulletin even chose one episode to educate the public about statistics. In addition, the...

Despite the strong sales and favorable reviews of Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson was sardonic. Ruth Krauss was also receiving good reviews for her work, including A Very Special House and I’ll Be You and You’ll Be Me. She continued to experiment, as Charlotte and the White Horse, published in the fall of 1955, shows. As 1955 drew to...

Today, some of the best work on children’s literature is being done in the field of American studies. Nathalie op de Beeck’s Suspended Animation and Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence both offer new, and deeply historical, ways of understanding how what children read may affect the ways they think. Op de Beeck’s institutional home is an English dep...

A recurring gag in Jeff Smith's acclaimed graphic novel series Bone (1991–2004) is that Moby-Dick (1851) is a snoozer. But, as we argue, Herman Melville's masterpiece puts other characters to sleep not because it is dull but because its most ardent advocate – protagonist Fone Bone himself – is a New Critic bent on divorcing the novel from the conte...

If in comics the gutters between panels enlist the reader's imagination to create closure, in picture books it is the turning of the page that prompts the act of closure. If comics rely on juxtapositions between "pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence" (to quote Scott McCloud [9]), picture books more commonly rely on juxtapositions betwe...

This article surveys a range of recent literature for younger children that challenges the status quo. The authors ask: What pressing issues of the day are treated in children's literature, and how? What are the incentives and disincentives for creating, distributing, and reading radical children's literature? To what degree have radical children's...

The first major biography—Judith and Neil Morgan's Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: A Biography (1995)—is the primary source, giving us the facts and charting a path from which many others (myself included) have profited. The second, Charles Cohen's lavishly illustrated The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography (2004), foun...

The study of children’s literature and culture has been experiencing a renaissance, with vital new work proliferating across many areas of interest. Mapping this vibrant scholarship, Keywords for Children’s Literature presents 49 original essays on the essential terms and concepts of the field. From Aesthetics to Young Adult, an impressive, multidi...

In a column published five days after the 2008 election, journalist Jason Whitlock said of the president-elect's life: "His is a tale that should be read aloud at bedtime in every American neighborhood." It was already being read aloud in some neighborhoods. Even before Senator Obama had won the election, there were twelve juvenile titles about his...

Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer, offers ten essays, each of which approaches the idea of "home" through a different critical lens. From Andrew O'Malley's examination of how Robinsonade narratives enact domesticity as colonization, to Louise Saldanha's thesis that Canadian multiculturalism offers mor...

In her preface Ellen Handler Spitz explains, "This book is for mothers, fathers, grandparents, teachers, therapists, and scholars" (xiii). Though Inside Picture Books names scholars among its intended audiences and has been published by a university press, it does not appear to be directed at those who study children's literature. Rarely does it ac...

Minders of Make-Believe is the first comprehensive history of the American children’s book business. Up until now, one could have only cobbled together a partial history from various sources—notably Barbara Bader’s American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (1975), Beverly Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Childre...

Although celebrated as a great postmodernist, Don DeLillo resists the label. As he told an interviewer in 1998: Post-modern seems to mean different things in… different disciplines. In architecture and art it means one or two different things. In fiction it seems to mean another. When people say White Noise is post-modern, I don't really complain....

In 1912, a revolutionary chick cries, “Strike down the wall!” and liberates itself from the “egg state.” In 1940, ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and unite to fight fascism. In 1972, Baby X grows up without a gender and is happy about it. Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer,...

Published by Random House in 2007. The book is out of print, but you can learn more about it at NPR: http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138326093/the-annotated-cat-under-the-hats-of-seuss-and-his-cats

The Lion and the Unicorn 29.2 (2005) 236-267 In July 2000, The Boston Globe's Dan Wasserman drew a cartoon that predicted what would become the most prominent threat to Harry Potter's literary legacy. Several months ahead of the beginning of the Harry Potter marketing bonanza and more than a year before the release of the first Potter film, Wasserm...

Children's Literature 33 (2005) 242-251 Michelle Martin's Brown Gold and Anita Silvey's 100 Best Books provide detailed, if different, maps for the vast field of children's literature. Silvey offers a kind of Baedeker's guide to children's books published in America over the last century; readers seeking a compact course in the subject would do wel...

Children's Literature Association Quarterly 30.4 (2005) 349-353 In his essay "A Plea for Radical Children's Literature," Herbert Kohl asks: According to Kohl, "There is a vast, almost empty field when it comes to progressive fiction for young people" (61). And yet, the field only appears empty because, first, many progressive works for children hav...

symploke 13.1/2 (2006) 370-371 This volume offers thirteen ways of looking at Underworld, revealing some of those layers of meaning that lie "under words," as Joseph Dewey says in his introduction (9). Twelve of these essays succeed admirably, offering thoughtful assessments in succinct, clear prose—a rarity in academic writing. Indeed, a good numb...

Children's Literature 32 (2004) 226-230 With the possible exception of chapter seven (more on that later), this book is not about postmodern Pinocchio. Happily, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern offers a richer and broader analysis than its title suggests. Tracking the "Perils of a Puppet in the United States," Wunderlich and Morrissey examine the transfor...

Dr. Seuss: American Icon celebrates one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century: Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as 'Dr. Seuss'. Dr Seuss's ascendance from children's author to American icon confirms that his cultural significance rests not just with the beginning reader, but with the scholar, the artist, and the poet. Seus...