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Celebrating James Marshall and Humor in Children’s Books

Moderator: Roger Sutton
Susan Meddaugh David Wiesner Anita Silvey Susan Moynihan: November 18, 2008; Running Time: 1:14:15

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Friends, colleagues and fans unite in loving praise of a children’s author who, though renowned, never got his due. James Marshall was writer/illustrator of the George and Martha and The Cut-Ups book series (he also illustrated Miss Nelson and The Stupids series, among many others). He died at age 50 in 1992, never having received the coveted children’s picture book honor, The Caldecott Medal. These panelists do their best to redress the injustice.

Susan Meddaugh of Martha Speaks fame, remembers Marshall from her days as a book designer. She has fond memories of him “trying his stories out on us as he went from office to office” at Houghton Mifflin, and credits him with launching her freelance career when he found her an apartment in Charlestown, MA for an improbable $75 a month. Meddaugh celebrates Marshall’s ability to “establish characters instantly,” and the way in which “Jim didn’t have to find originality, he just was. Every part of his personality came through in his books.”

“My appreciation for his work leapt exponentially,” says David Wiesner (The Three Pigs, Tueday) “after I began reading his books to my kids.” There’d be “the big smile, laughing and total connection.” When Wiesner repeatedly paused to marvel at how Marshall’s words and pictures came together, his children would have to remind him to get on with the story. Wiesner finds much to admire in the George and Martha books: “They’re so concise; there’s nothing extraneous going on.” He enjoys their “beautifully minimalistic art,” as well as the “ornate, almost dense” illustrations of The Stupids. Says Wiesner, “He’s one of the few people I think about when I’m doing a book: How can I take what I’m doing and keep it to its essence and not fill it up?” The beauty of Jim’s work, he says, is that “it looks like it was created in the moment.”

Anita Silvey has been reading, editing and reviewing children’s books for years, and had the pleasure of accompanying Marshall on book tours. Silvey has recently been exploring Marshall’s notebooks and studying his working style. He often pursued several ideas at a time, and his beginning sketches and text have a lot of detail. “There’s a long evolutionary process, with thumbnail sketches” and rewriting “and all of a sudden, he circles one word, the perfect word...” Yet his final sketch had “a lightness of touch,” the appearance of spontaneity. Silvey recalls, “I once saw Jim sketch an entire book out on a cocktail napkin. He could do a quick, creative thing, then he went to work.” That’s why his books “are so timeless.”

Roger Sutton notes how Marshall respected his audience: he never talked down to kids, and trusted them to pick up on things. Even sarcastic adult humor was okay. Librarian Susan Moynihan says that the kids to whom she reads get Marshall’s humor without requiring adult filtering, and they also get his “message of kindness.” In Marshall’s books, “nobody was made fun of.”

Lecture Details

Location: 32-123

“The picture book -- I think it’s the most beautiful form ever created. There’s nothing more perfect, because it draws on what the child has. They can see visually, see details, and it moves them to the words which they are not as adept at. (There is a) ballet in a perfect picture book between words and text. It’s the greatest form to work in. ”

Roger Sutton

About the Speakers

Moderator: Roger Sutton

Editor in Chief, The Horn Book and Author

Roger Sutton has served as editor of the children's book resource, The Horn Book, since 1996. He was previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and a children's and young adult librarian. He is also the author of Hearing Us Out: Voices from the Gay and Lesbian Community.

Sutton received his M.A. in Library Science from the University of Chicago in 1982, and a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1978.

Susan Meddaugh

Author/Illustrator

Susan Meddaugh graduated from Wheaton College, where she studied French literature and fine arts. After working briefly with an advertising agency in New York, she moved to Boston and worked at a publishing company for 10 years, first as a designer, then art editor, and finally as art director. While there, she did the illustrations for Good Stones, (Houghton Mifflin) by Anne Epstein, and then decided to strike out on her own as a freelance illustrator and creator of children's books. Since that time, Meddaugh has written and illustrated many popular books for children, including Martha Speaks,, which was chosen as a New York Times Best Illustrated Book for 1992. In 1998 she was awarded the New England Book Award, given by the New England Booksellers Association to recognize a body of work. Her work also was acknowledged with a New York Times, Best Illustrated Award.

David Wiesner

Author/Illustrator

David Wiesner has illustrated more than twenty award-winning books for young readers. Two of the picture books he both wrote and illustrated became instant classics when they won the prestigious Caldecott Medal: Tuesday in 1992 and The Three Pigs in 2002. Two of his other titles, Sector 7 and Free Fall, are Caldecott Honor Books. An exhibit of Wiesner's original artwork, "Seeing the Story," toured the United States in 2000 and 2001. Among his many honors, Wiesner holds the Japan Picture Book Award for Tuesday, the Prix Sorcières (the French equivalent of the Caldecott Medal) for The Three Pigs, and a 2004 IBBY Honour Book nomination for illustration, also for The Three Pigs. Flotsam, his most recent work, was a New York Times bestseller and was recently named winner of the 2007 Caldecott Medal, making Wiesner only the second person in the award’s long history to have won three times.

Anita Silvey

Children's and Young Adult Book Expert

The author of 100 Best Books for Children and 500 Great Books for Teens, Anita Silvey has devoted 35 years to promoting books that will turn the young -- and families -- into readers. As publisher of children’s books for Houghton Mifflin Company from 1995-2001, she oversaw all the children’s book and young adult publishing for both the Houghton and Clarion lists, including such well-known authors and illustrators as H. A. and Margret Rey, Virginia Lee Burton, David Macaulay, Lois Lowry, Allen Say, David Wiesner, Karen Cushman, Linda Sue Park, and Chris Van Allsburg.

Prior to her role as publisher, Silvey served for 11 years as Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book Magazine, a publication many call “the Bible of children’s literature.” As editor of Horn Book, she read several thousand books a year, hunting for those of exceptional quality that children return to again and again. Silvey is the editor of Children’s Books and Their Creators, an overview of 20th Century children’s books. As she says in this volume, “Life is a banquet and most of us starve,” when it comes to knowledge about books for young readers. Little Brown published her selection of short stories for young adults, Help Wanted. Houghton Mifflin published The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators in 2002, 100 Best Books for Children in 2004, and 500 Great Books for Teens, in 2006.