“My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful.” — Ezra Jack Keats

Ezra Jack Keats was one of my authors when I was about six years old and his books were staples in my childhood. He is somehow looped in my head to Sesame Street, because the world being depicted in his classic tales (Peter’s Chair (Picture Puffins), The Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie, A Letter to Amy) was the same New York one as in Sesame Street, and it was so different from the turf farm slash beach town world of my upbringing. He made New York City look like a big wonderland – where kids lived, kids like me – with graffiti, and mounds of snow, and stop lights at intriguing brick corners. The illustrations are hypnotic – works of art.

Barry, my father’s best friend, was friends with Ezra Jack Keats, so we grew up feeling a strange personal connection to the man who wrote the books we loved.

Letter to Amy was my favorite. It tells the story of a little boy who is planning his birthday party, and everyone he has invited is a boy as well … but … but … what about his friend Amy? Even though she is a girl, they are friends. But how will that go over if a girl comes to his party? Will he be made fun of? He writes a birthday invitation to her. It is a thundery rainy day. The illustrations are phenomenal and evocative. I love rainy days anyway, and I loved them as a little girl too – and Ezra Jack Keats completely captures the watery reflective urban world of a rainy dark day. The whole journey of that book, of grade school angst, and friendship, and learning to be firm enough to like who you want to like, despite peer pressure, really touched me.

The illustration above tore at my 6-year-old heart. The gesture of despair and hurt. I remember feeling really devastated by it. I don’t think I was even going to school yet, so I didn’t have an experience of being hurt by a friend yet but … maybe I knew it was coming? Maybe it gave me a glimpse of what could happen? I understood it. I remember the feeling.

We also loved Whistle for Willie.

Ezra Jack Keats is best known for The Snowy Day, or maybe Whistle for Willie. In Snowy Day, the city shuts down in a snowstorm.

Some years ago, when we had a massive snowstorm, I was struggling through Times Square, through literally mountainous drifts, trying to get to Port Authority so I could get home – and the roads were completely shut down, no cars anywhere, and people were cross-country-skiing down Broadway. Snowball fights broke out in the middle of 7th Avenue. Sound gets muffled and also amplified by the snow, things get strangely quiet with no traffic, and the stoplights keep going – red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow … even though no cars can approach. The illustrations in The Snowy Day completely invoke that world: the strange quiet that descends over a bustling metropolis when there are mounds of snow.

Happy birthday to an American classic.

 
 
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