Ezra Jack Keats is one of my favorite children’s book author, and he is always, somehow, looped in my head to Sesame Street, the world being depicted in his classic tales (Peter’s Chair (Picture Puffins)
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 all 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.
Ezra Jack Keats is probably best known for The Snowy Day.The city shuts down in a snowstorm like that.
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.
Some more illustrations below from his books:
I am proud to report that Nathan is crazy about these books. He even has a Peter doll. (Since Maxwell’s arrival, it is his “baby”–he gives him bottles, etc.)
I love these books! How cool that your dad’s friend knew him.
I don’t remember if I read these books when I was little; it’s a huge regret of mine that I remember so little of my childhood reading. I did read The Snowy Day with my kids, though, and there was this one line that always bothered me. Peter takes off his wet socks and then the next line is, “He thought and he thought and he thought about them.” He was thinking of something that had happened before, but the grammarian in me always grumbles that it sounded like he was pondering the wet socks he’d just taken off. When I pointed this out to my kids, as young as they were, even they could see this and it made us laugh every time. Now they’re teenagers and we STILL quote that line when someone takes off socks.
But I wanted to say that I LOVE how you expressed something I’ve been trying to get at for years, about how the pictures depicted an urban world in a magical way. I grew up on the L.A. coast and so for me, the world of Sesame Street and books like these were amazing. I still have never been east of the Rockies so these cityscapes are mythical in my imagination.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn evokes that in me. And there was this random little book I also read to my kids, picked up in a yard sale or something, called Let’s Go Around the Neighborhood. The mother and her child take a bus to the city and walk around all these Mom and Pop stores to run errands. I remember they purchase an eggbeater! So there’s the funky datedness of old-fashioned errands I’d have run with my grandma along with the REAL CITY. It gave me thrills to read it and I never really understood why.
This made me smile today – thank you.
Diana, I know what you’re saying. I grew up in a small town in Minnesota, and Sesame Street and these books (and others like them) seemed like a magical world. (And, I was lucky enough when I was really young to have a corner store where my mother could send me for a “loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and a stick of butter”.
But its not only that, these books and Sesame Street were my first introduction to the idea that there were people in the world who didn’t look like me, but did the same things I did. Mostly. But in a strange, magical world.
I can’t wait to read these books to somebody in the not to distant future.
Oh, Pat!!!!
His illustrations are wonderfully unique, not to mention how great his storytelling is. His book about a girl’s fancy hat is really cute–I used it as an example of collage when I was student teaching the first grade about the Caldecott Medal and different types of illustrations.
I love Ezra Jack Keats soooo much. Every time we had a “snow day” when my kids were little, we read The Snowy Day and ate peanut butter toast and hot chocolate. Now that I am teaching kindergarten, the children know that it is really special when I break out Ezra Jack Keats. He is an American icon.