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:
How interesting! I grew up on A Snowy Day…some books read in youth live forever in you. I assumed Keats was black also. After reading your post, I found an article in which he explains how and why he featured this boy (he featured other minorities as well), in his stories…http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/about/index.html
I love your blog!
Cheers!
The Snowy Day was my favorite childhood book, bar none. It captures so perfectly what life feels like when you’re that age and you find something new out about how the world works. I remember keeping a cup of milk out in my room ‘for later.’ And coming back several hours later and finding it thrown away because milk goes sour – who knew? This book is about finding out about those mundane facts about the world – snow melts. But it’s also about how we can’t hang on to the beauty of the moment – life doesn’t permit you to store the perfect snowball in your pocket!
Ted – I love that interpretation! Yes – when the world is new and you think you know what you’re doing and then you discover something else. Amazing!!
I loved Letter to Amy because, ultimately, it’s about being true to who you are – so you’re 7 years old and one of your friends is a girl. Big whup. You like her. Invite her to the party. But his torment over it!!!!
And the blotchy illustrations of thundery sky – just so awesome.
My favorite Keats book is definitely The Snowy Day, though Whistle for Willie comes a close second. What I particularly love about The Snowy Day is how the pace and activity of the book focus the reader on the present, just as a childâs perspective is anchored not so much in the past and future (as the perspective of most adults isâ¦) but in the present. I also think Keats masterfully captures Peterâs worry that the snow will be gone the next dayâPeter dreams that it all meltsâand his joy when he wakes up to find that more snow has fallen!
In Whistle for Willie, I love the scene where Peter has been spinning around and around, to make himself dizzy, and how Keats portrays the lights on the traffic signals as displaced from the signals, brilliantly capturing how crazy things look when you’re dizzy.
Okay, one more: I also love Hi Cat!, and particularly the scene where Archie has been eating a mint-green ice-cream cone and has some of the ice-cream on his face. Then Peterâs dog Willie comes and licks his face clean! (I have wonderful childhood memories of this very illustrationâ¦).
It was also interesting for me to learn that Keats’s focus on ethnically diverse characters in his books was in part the result of his own experience of antisemitism (he was Jewish) after WWII. He had deep sympathy for the racial and ethnic prejudices suffered by African-Americans and Latinos in the U.S. He was truly a multicultural leader.