After a four week survey of a multitude of children’s book authors and illustrators, and learning to analyze their works and the methods used to make them effective literary pieces for children, it is certainly appropriate to apply these new skills to evaluate a single author’s works. Specifically, this paper focuses on the life and works of Ezra Jack Keats, a writer and illustrator of books for children who single handedly expanded the point of view of the genre to include the experiences of multicultural children with his Caldecott Award winning book “Snowy Day.” The creation of Peter as a character is ground breaking in and of itself, but after reading the text the reader is driven to wonder why “Peter” was created. Was he a vehicle for political commentary as some might suggest or was he simply another “childhood” that had; until that time, been ignored? If so, what inspired him to move in this direction? Born in March of 1916 as Jacob (Jack) Ezra Katz, he was the third child to Benjamin and Augusta Katz. His parents were both Polish immigrants of Jewish descent and they raised him in East New York, the predominantly Jewish section of Brooklyn. As immigrants they were plagued with financial difficulties and this was further aggravated when they struggled through the Depression. Despite all of these hardships, Keats had already begun to showcase his artistic abilities. At the age of eight he was hired to paint the sign of a local store. Naturally, his father was quite proud of him when he earned twenty-five cents for his work and hoped that this might endeavor might lead to a steady career as a sign pa¬inter. Unfortunately for him, Keats was smitten with Fine Arts and won his first award in Junior High School: a medal for ... ... middle of paper ... ...undeniable. Works Cited Gerard J.Keats, Ezra Jack. Goggles! New York: Puffin Books, 1969. Keats, Ezra Jack, and Cherr, Pat. My Dog is Lost! New York: Crowell, 1960. Keats, Ezra Jack. Peter’s Chair. New York: Viking, 1967. Keats, Ezra Jack. Skates! New York: Watts, 1973 Keats, Ezra Jack. The Snowy Day. New York: Viking, 1962. Senick, Gerard J., and Hedblad, Alan. Children’s Literature Review: Excerpts from Reviews, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People (Volumes 14, 34, 35). Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research, 1995.. Ezra Jack Keats: A Virtual Exhibit. The University of Southern Mississippi De Grummond Children's Literature Collection. Web. 19 July 2010. . Http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/. Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. Web. 19 July 2010. .
Wilson, Nance S. “ZINDEL, Paul.” Continuum Encyclopedia Of Children’s Literature (2003): 848-849. Literary Reference Center. Web. 24 Jan. 2014.
Murry has written several reviews for books, films, and museums and has dreamed of creating her own children’s book. Over the years, Meg could not finish a book so she decided to take a course at Arbor Community College called: Fiction Writing for the Youth Market, How to Get Started, taught by Tess Whatsit. (R. 31). Whatsit taught at Arbor Community College from 2004 through 2015 and taught Meg Murry for eight weeks from the middle of January 2015 until the middle of March 2015. (R. 18). At the same time, Tess Whatsit had been an editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers from about 1987 until 2015 when she opened her book packager, Watermark Books, a liaison between authors and publishers, in which she is founder and president. (R.
The Virgin and the Whore: An Analysis of Keats’s Madeline in “The Eve of Saint Agnes”
Maurice Sendak: From Controversy To Success. “These are difficult times for children. Children have to be brave to survive what the world does to them. And this world is scrungier and rougher and dangerouser than it ever was before”—Maurice Sendak. Throughout the past fifty years, Maurice Sendak has been a challenging and inventive voice in children’s literature.
... Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns.
Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865. His father was a lawyer-turned-Irish painter. In 1867 the family followed him to London and settled in Bedford Park. In 1881 they returned to Dublin, where Yeats studied the Metropolitan School of Art. Yeats spent much time with his grandparents in County Sligo in northwestern Ireland. The scenery and folklore of this region greatly influenced Yeats' work. For a while he studied art, but during the 1890s he became active in London's literary life and helped found the Rhymers' Club.
Falconer, Rachel. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Children literature is a term that refers to the texts written for children. The artist uses creative ways to ensure that children are provided with educational books, touching on a variety of themes. This paper will include comparison of two characters from the two texts, “Hana's Suitcase: A True Story,” authored by Karen Levine and “Charlotte’s Web,” written by E.B. White, with the aim of understanding ways in which problems are solvable as indicated by selected characters.
Richard Robinson, the President and CEO of Scholastic Inc., the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books, said that a great children’s text contains a simple and original idea, is written with humour and makes the world more interesting. Despite being published in 1928, A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner remains a highly effective children’s text. The text meets the criteria set out by Richard Robinson and it has been able to do so through its good uses of literary elements such as style, themes and characters. Some examples of this can be linked to the works of various developmental theorists such as Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Erik Erikson.
Life is full of change, it is the natural order of things, without change life would be at a standstill, without cause, just an empty world. Change is how new ideas arise, how things become better or worse, without it we wouldn’t be here on this earth. In opposition, there is also a world of changelessness, it is the only thing that remains constant in our lives, there is always change and that gives us the allusion of changelessness. Things are moving so fast that they seem to be standing still as a car flying down the road at sixty-five miles an hour, without the background we wouldn’t be able to tell of the movement. Each of these famous poems by Yeats express this view of the world in their own different stories His first being, “When You Are Old” a poem to a lost lover, in his past that he want to speak to her future person. Next there is the peace searching for him in, “Lake Isle Innis free” where he goes to escape the cities constant change, and his poem written at the same place, “The Swans at Lake Coole” as he watches the seemingly eternity living swans live forever. He finishes with the greatness of, “The Second Coming” where he strictly talks about what the human nature is losing, religion as in “Sailing to Byzantium” whereas the relation of changelessness would be the greatest ending to a life, instead of living that life over again. William Butler Yeats, has a fantastic way of expressing the opposition of the two mediums in life, Change and Changelessness.
Since the 18th century children’s literature has been held responsible for bringing entertainment to children of all ages across the world. But, when you actually think about it, what is children’s literature? The term seems easy enough to define, it is literature intended for children, but what is the definition of literature? According to Charlotte Huck (2010), literature is an imaginative shaping of life and thought into the forms and structures of language. This, in my opinion, is an excellent definition to use due to the fact that children’s literature is constantly changing. From older literature, including songs and stories told orally, to more-modern themed children’s literature told from newer books and now even computers, it is easy to tell that the historical perspectives and trends of children’s literature continue to change throughout time.
Rpt. in Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns.
... (eds), Children’s Literature Classic Text and Contemporary Trends, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan in association with Open University
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Voices in the Park were published at either end of the twentieth century, a period which witnessed the creation of the modern picturebook for children. They are both extremely prestigious examples of picturebooks of their type, the one very traditional, the other surrealist and postmodern. The definition of ‘picturebook’ used here is Bader’s: ‘an art form [which] hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning of the page’ (Bader, quoted in Montgomery, 2009, p. 211). In contrast with a simple illustrated book, the picturebook can use all of the technology available to it to produce an indistinguishable whole, the meaning and value of which is dependent on the interplay between all or any of these aspects. Moebius’s claim that they can ‘portray the intangible and invisible[…], ideas that escape easy definition in pictures or words’ is particularly relevant to these two works. Potter’s book is, beneath its didactic Victorian narrative, remarkably subtle and subversive in its attitudes towards childhood, and its message to its child readers. Browne’s Voices in the Park, on the other hand, dispenses with any textual narrative; by his use of the devices of postmodernism, visual intertextuality and metaphor, he creates a work of infinite interpretation, in which the active involvement of the reader is key.
Literature has been part of society since pen met paper. It has recorded history, retold fables, and entertained adults for centuries. Literature intended for children, however, is a recent development. Though children’s literature is young, the texts can be separated into two categories by age. The exact splitting point is debatable, but as technology revolutionized in the mid-twentieth century is the dividing point between classic and contemporary. Today’s children’s literature is extraordinarily different from the classics that it evolved from, but yet as classic was transformed into modern, the literature kept many common features.