From the July/August 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Eric Carle

By Ann Beneduce

n 1952, just before his twenty-third birthday, Eric Carle returned to the United States with a portfolio under his arm and forty dollars in his pocket. Fifty years later, in November 2002, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art opened its doors to an admiring public. Between these two landmark events lay half a century dedicated to creating pictures and stories that are known and loved by children all over the world.

Eric Carle was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929. He has cherished memories of a joyful childhood there, and particularly of his first school experience. He often speaks of the sense of happiness he felt in that sun-filled American schoolroom, with large sheets of paper and fat brushes and pots of colorful paints. He already loved making pictures, and his first-grade teacher urged his mother to nurture his talent, which indeed she did. But when he was just six years old, his parents, German immigrants, decided to return to Germany. It was an ill-timed venture, as they were later to discover. Hitler and his Nazi party were on the rise, though at first this did not seem ominous to Eric’s parents. They lived on the outskirts of Stuttgart, in his grandparents’ four-family house, every unit of which was occupied by members of their large and affectionate extended family. Eric hated his German school and his disciplinarian teachers, but his new life was not without its pleasures. He especially loved taking long walks in the nearby countryside with his father, who shared with Eric his avid interest in nature and in drawing. In summer there were unforgettable visits to relatives’ farms. The little boy loved the horses, cows, and other animals, as well as the sturdy farm folk.

With the outbreak of World War II, Eric’s father was called up for service in the German army. As the war years dragged on, life for Eric and his mother grew harder. There was no word from his father, and they feared he had been killed. Children were evacuated from the city, and Eric lived for a time with a family in Schwenningen, near the Black Forest. Then, when the Allied forces came closer, he and his classmates were transported to the Siegfried line on the Rhine River to dig, together with prisoners of war and old men, defensive trenches. Eric had some harrowing experiences before being reunited with his mother in Stuttgart, though he seldom speaks of them.

Finally, the war was over. A year later, he received a postcard from his father (it contained just twenty-five words — the limit set by his captors). Though a prisoner in the Soviet Union, he was alive! The American forces occupied Stuttgart, and Eric got a job as a file clerk with the Denazi-fication Department of the U.S. Military Government, where he was able to brush up his almost forgotten English and also (much more important!) to eat in the officers’ dining room. But after a few months this Edenic existence was ended, as Eric’s high school reopened.

Back in school, Eric hated most of his studies, but his outstanding artistic talent was recognized and fostered by his art teacher, who encouraged him to work in his own distinctive but unconventional style. Four years of more intensive training in the graphic arts followed, at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, a period of study that Eric recalls as “inspiring and exhilarating” after ten stifling years of grammar and high school. While still an art student, Eric created a series of posters for Amerika Haus, the U.S. Information Center. On graduating, he worked for a time as the art director of the promotion department of a fashion magazine. Finally, in 1952, he felt he was ready to fulfill his long-held dream of returning to the United States, his native land.

New York at that time was an exciting place for a young artist — the humming, buzzing new center of the international art world. But first, for Eric, there was the matter of earning a living. His approach to finding a job was as direct as his poster style. He went to the New York Art Directors Show, where he admired the work of Leo Lionni, who was then the art director for Fortune magazine. A telephone call to Lionni produced an invitation to lunch and an introduction to the art director of the New York Times, who hired Eric as a graphic designer. He had been back in this country for just two weeks. Already he had found in Lionni a friend and mentor, and had a job that he loved.

But though the war was over, the draft was not, and in a few months Eric received greetings from Uncle Sam. And ironically, because of his fluency in the German language, he soon found himself back in Stuttgart, working with the special services of the U.S. Army. Upon his discharge, Eric returned to this country and to his job at the New York Times. In 1953, he had married a young German woman in Stuttgart, and over the next few years he and Dorothea had two children, a daughter, Cirsten, and a son, Rolf, both now talented and creative adults. But in 1963 Eric and Dorothea’s marriage ended in divorce.

It was a critical time in Eric’s career as well as in his personal life. He had earlier moved from the Times to an excellent job at an advertising agency. However, he had begun to find himself being promoted to higher, more executive positions that moved him further and further away from the art he loved to do. He was well known in his field by now, so he decided it would be safe to quit and to work as a freelance designer and advertising artist, specializing in illustrations for pharmaceutical advertisements. It was one of these ads that caught the eye of Bill Martin Jr., who was looking for an illustrator for his text for Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? About working on the illustrations for this book, Eric says, “I was set on fire! [I realized that] it was possible . . . to do something special that would show a child the joy to be found in books.” The door to Eric’s true career had opened. Eric has written of this moment of self-discovery: “The long, dark time of growing up in wartime Germany, the cruelly enforced discipline of my school years there, the dutifully performed work at my jobs in advertising — all these were finally losing their rigid grip on me. The child inside me — who had been so suddenly and sharply uprooted and repressed — was beginning to come joyfully back to life.”

However, illustrating texts written by other people was not totally fulfilling for Eric. Now that his joy in creativity had been reawakened, not only pictures but also stories began streaming out. 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo (which I was privileged to publish in 1968) was the first book of Eric’s that was completely his own. Many elements of his characteristic style were already present in this book. The handsomely designed jacket with the type running across the open mouth of a lion reflects the influence of his poster technique. A gatefold page presages the innovative formats he would use in many books to come. Because Eric was still hesitant to write in English, 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo has no text at all (though the wordless story can be “read” and understood easily, as can the simple counting lesson, just by looking at the colorful, expressive pictures).

But in his next book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and in all the others he has written since, he has proved to have a prose style that is both eloquent and easy to read as well as a distinctive, instantly recognizable graphic style — the boldly designed tissue collages augmented with colorful acrylic for which he is so well known. That children all over the world have taken these books to their hearts is not surprising, for Eric Carle creates every one of his books with a deep sensitivity to the emotions and concerns of his very young audience. Like his collages, his stories are many-layered; beneath the playful, humorous narrative there lies a “moral,” a lesson, or a nugget of wisdom for the small reader or listener. Hope, courage, friendship, fairness, and love are among his themes; he also deals empathetically (and positively) with a small child’s emotions, such as feelings of loneliness, fear of moving to a new house, or of going to school for the first time. In all his books, he shares his own exuberance and creativity with his readers.

In 1973, Eric married Barbara Morrison, whose professional work in the education of young children perfectly complemented his own interests. Over the intervening years, he has illustrated more than seventy beautiful books, most of which he also wrote. Eric’s creativity has occasionally leapt the confines of the thirty-two-page book: painting, sculpture, and printmaking, as well as furniture and building design, are among the other areas this ebullient artist enjoys exploring. In 2001, he designed the sets and costumes for a production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, a new and happy artistic experience for him. Last year, Eric and Barbara Carle together opened the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, to celebrate the work of children’s book artists from all over the world. Of course, the museum holds enormous interest for adults, but, perhaps more important, Eric has planned it to be a unique source of inspiration for young visitors. And now, in 2003, Eric Carle has received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in fitting recognition of his many years dedicated to sharing the joy of creativity with children.

Ann Beneduce has worked closely with Eric Carle throughout her career, as editor-in-chief of the children’s book departments at World Publishing (1963– 1969), Crowell (1969–1977), Collins/World (1977–1980), and Philomel, which she founded in 1980 and headed until 1986.