David Small

hen an illustrator wins the Caldecott Medal, he or she joins a rare club of outstanding artists. The award means that the honored book is destined to be read and reread by children all over this country in mind-boggling numbers.

Winning the Caldecott medal represents a peak in an artist's professional life. Delighted to have this approbation from the young audiences and professional world that he or she has been serving, the Caldecott winner breathes a pleased and contented sigh. It is not surprising that the artist takes stock, asking the simple question: How did I get here? How did I become an artist, creating this book at this time?

In David Small's case, everyone around him — friends and family — knew from the time he was a toddler that he would be an artist. He started drawing when he was two — anything that his young eye caught and wanted to put on paper. By six he had settled down to drawing cats, "because I wanted a cat." He sketched them "sitting, running, leaping" on every scrap of paper he could find.

Born in Detroit, on the bustling northwest side, not so far from the thriving if noisy automobile industry, he was the second son of a radiologist father and a music- and art-loving mother. From his earliest days, he cherished his solitude. "Grade school," he says, "was just one big interruption: I was concentrating on something inside of me. That's why I never liked TV. I was concentrating on the stories I was making up in my own head."

By the time he was seven and eight, he was covering sheets of paper with his own cartoons, making up his own strips with spirited and often witty interpretations in the spirit of Walt Kelly's Pogo, probably his favorite. "I didn't get most of the politics, but I loved the way the character was drawn," the artist says.

However, as clear as David Small's artistic future may have been from his family and friends' point of view, by the time David was eight he grew more and more intrigued by words, making up his own stories as intently as he created pictures. And by the time he was eleven, he knew that writing was what he wanted to do. In his teens, he could put it differently: Literature was a superior art form, fuller and broader. And harder. And because he always wanted to do the hard thing, his future was set: he would become a writer — no, he would become a playwright.

When he was seventeen, one of his plays was put on by a Detroit company, the Concept East. It was a "hot and steamy" Southern melodrama, conceived in part from stories and impressions left him by his Kentucky grandmother. It was received well, and he was encouraged.
Meanwhile, he kept drawing.

Even then a wry wit pervaded both his writing and his art, perhaps influenced by a father who had a cynical sense of humor. And perhaps, too, influenced by the increasingly troubled and torn environment of Detroit. Humor made up for a lot, he says.

The turn in the road for the Caldecott artist came unexpectedly. Not surprisingly, David Small chose to attend Wayne State University's Montieth College, an experimental college within the greater university, "run by a sociologist who thought if you gave kids blocks of knowledge and freedom, you would have a more complete person." In his sophomore year, one of his friends, a photographer by training, looked over his shoulder one day while he was doodling: "Those doodles that you draw at the edges of your pages are better than your playwriting," he said. And David listened.

Abruptly, at twenty, he took a right-angle turn and began studying art. First at Wayne State, and then at Yale University, where he received a masters degree in art and printmaking.

He describes his education as classical, but he has always been interested in the psychology of people and situations: Daumier and Goya and Redon were artists he admired for their interest in psychological states. They were artists with a dark side. Artists with a sardonic view of the world.

After graduation and for fourteen years, David Small taught printmaking, life drawing (his favorite subject), and design, first at Fredonia College in New York, then at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, but he continued to hone his appreciation for the sardonic. For years he worked as a freelance editorial artist, his drawings appearing in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

But it was in the field of children's literature that he gained his greatest popularity. Growing from draftsman to illustrator, he has illustrated twenty-nine picture books, six of them his own. He has celebrated the psychology of character and the relationship of environment to character in every single one — from Imogene's Antlers to Fenwick's Suit, both of which he wrote, to his 1998 Caldecott Honor Book The Gardener, written by his partner in life and art, Sarah Stewart.

The manuscript for So You Want to Be President? (Philomel) came to him as a surprise, but he contends that he had been waiting for it. His pleasure in political psychology, his old delight in Pogo, his sense of the sardonic, all were excited by the manuscript by author Judith St. George that celebrated the facts and foibles of our thirty-seven presidents. He began to illustrate the manuscript even before he signed a contract.

Sketching freely, wildly at times, he created page after page, tacking them up on his Michigan-farmhouse studio wall. Before the drawings were in the publisher's hands, visitors to the studio, looking at the sheets of ebullient drawings, were telling him that here was a book both wry and distinguished, a book that would make its mark.

From the moment it was published, the book garnered attention from reviewers, librarians, and teachers. Most commentary reflected the reader's delight that here was a book that integrated words and art, a genuinely whole book; and also a book that gave the reader a witty yet sure picture of the vulnerabilities and possibilities inherent in our American presidents. And a book that confirmed, somehow, the humanity in us all.

Patricia Lee Gauch is vice president and publisher of Philomel Books.