In 1952, a book appeared that redefined childrenâs literature. âA lap is so you donât get crumbs on the floor,â it proclaimed. âA mustache is to wear on Halloween. A hat is to wear on a train.â The book didnât even try to tell a story. Instead, it spoke in associative logic and whimsical spot illustrations, leapfrogging from definition to definition, explaining how the world works. Its author, Ruth Krauss, had gathered many of the definitions from actual childrenâincluding the bookâs title, âA Hole Is to Digââand worked with a little-known twenty-three-year-old artist named Maurice Sendak to draw the squirmy, cheeky kids on each page. As Krauss told her editor, the Harper & Row legend Ursula Nordstrom, âIâm afraid Iâll have a good book in spite of myself.â
In the past two months, New York Review Books reissued âThe Backward Dayâ (1950) andâEverything Under a Mushroomâ (1973), two works that frame Kraussâs career. âThe Backward Day,â with spare line drawings by Marc Simont, tells the story of a boy who wakes up one morning, declares that âToday is backward day,â and goes about his morning in reverse. âEverything Under a Mushroomâ is even more formally strange: each of the bookâs two-page spreads features a simple, hypnotic poem and, underneath it, a richly panoramic scene by Margot Tomes. Taken together, the books showcase how Krauss pioneered a method that now seems intuitive: portraying the world from the perspective of a childâs imagination.
Krauss was born in Baltimore in 1901. Her paternal grandfather, Leopold, had emigrated from Hungary in the eighteen-sixties and started a successful furrier business, which her father, Julius, joined. Julius, who harbored artistic dreams, made sure that young Ruth was encouraged creatively. She was a sickly childââI nearly died a lot,â she later recalledâbut was nevertheless filled with energy, merrily lifting her dress in front of the neighbors or walking on her hands in the back yard. In 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire ravaged the city, destroying more than fifteen hundred buildings. Though the familyâs home and business were spared, Krauss developed a lifelong pyrophobia that compelled her to store her manuscripts in the freezer.
In her teens, Krauss dropped out of high school and enrolled in a costume-design program at the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts. Summers at Camp Walden, in Maine, solidified her love of both mischief and writing. (The campâs âBackward Partyâ of 1920, in which campers wore their uniforms the wrong way around, stuck with her for decades.) She had a flirtation with the violin, briefly spending time in a conservatory, but she didnât get a college degree until 1929, when she graduated from the Parsons School, in New York City. The Great Depression came into full force, and Krauss struggled to find work as an illustrator. In 1939, she joined a friend on an anthropology trip to Montana to live with the Blackfeet Nation, sparking an interest in language and how children absorb culture. Deciding that she would write books for young people, she soon marched into Ursula Nordstromâs office and slapped a manuscript down on her desk. Nordstrom became Kraussâs primary editor for the next several years.
Itâs impossible to discuss Krauss without mentioning her partner, the equally renowned childrenâs-book author Crockett Johnson. They met at a party in 1939, possibly in Greenwich Village; Johnson was tall and reserved, Krauss small and ebullient. (âWe met and that was it!â she later declared.) As Philip Nel observes in âCrockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss,â his richly detailed 2012 biography, the couple completely reshaped the arc of childrenâs literature. Johnson, a cartoonist and a political activist who created classic works such as âHarold and the Purple Crayon,â championed the power of childrenâs imagination over the lure of bourgeois rationalism. Though husband and wife mostly published independently, in 1945 they collaborated to produce âThe Carrot Seed,â which portrays one boyâs unwillingness to conform to the logic of others. In the book, the protagonistâs parents are afraid that a carrot seed wonât grow. His older brother declares, âIt wonât come up.â But the boy, clad in coveralls and a cap, remains steadfast, watering and weeding with determination. Is his care an act of defiance? Optimism? His perspective carries an almost existential force: if you plant a carrot seed, he believes, a carrot must come up. And so it does.
âThe Backward Day,â from a few years later, shows Krauss further immersing the reader in a childâs world view. In a riff on Kafkaâs âMetamorphosis,â in which a man wakes up as a giant insect, without understanding the principles under which this transformation has occurred, a little boy wakes one morning and declares that the day is âbackward.â He pulls his underwear over his clothes and parades backward down the stairs. At the breakfast table, he doesnât just sit backward but does so in his fatherâs chair; in backward logic, the boy is his own parent.
But the most striking part of the book comes when the rest of the family enters. âGoodnight, Pa,â the boy says. Without missing a beat, the father says, âGoodnight.â The exchange continues: the boy says, âGoodnight, Ma,â to his mother and âGoodnight, Baby,â to his sister. Each replies, âGoodnight.â The father sits backward in the boyâs chair, and the mother and sister swap seats. The whole family accepts the rule. Thereâs no argument, no questioning. Backward day is backward day.
This practical magic is revived in âA Hole Is to Dig,â which appeared two years later. The psychologist Arnold Gesell observed that children are, essentially, pragmatists, and Kraussâs great achievement was to take this logic to its extreme, conjuring a concrete vision of the world using the childâs imagination: âToes are to dance on; eyebrows are to go over your eyes.â She collected the phrases from kindergartners in Rowayton, Connecticut, where she lived, and from four- and five-year-olds at the Bank Street School, in New York City. The resulting book discarded both narrative and the single-perspective technique that had energized âThe Backward Day.â In a mode that melded Wittgenstein and Merriam-Webster, Krauss was evoking consciousness itself, as found in the way a specific group of people deployed language.
âA Hole Is to Digâ received glowing reviews. Krauss continued to work, producing at least one book every year of the fifties, even as she and Crockett found themselves under F.B.I. surveillance. (According to Nel, the surveillance began in 1950 and lasted for five years; the F.B.I. cared more about Crockettâs leftist activism than about the coupleâs books for young people.) Krauss began experimenting with other forms, including poetry for adults, but she was also frequently ill, suffering from the kinds of infections she was prone to as a child.
In 1973, she hadnât written a childrenâs book in three years. âEverything Under a Mushroomâ pulled her out of the funk. Like âA Hole Is to Dig,â the book does away with narrative and the notion of a central protagonist. Instead, we get an illustrated poem, which proceeds via associative chaining at the top of each spread. The poem is a series of phrasesâfour on each pageâthat begin with âlittle,â such as âlittle street little sign little moon little shine.â Krauss builds a simplified version of a pantoum: rather than the second and fourth lines of each quatrain becoming the first and third of the following, the third phrase in the sequence becomes the first phrase in the subsequent set.
The real excitement of âEverything Under a Mushroomâ flows from Margot Tomesâs illustrations: delicate, subtly shaded tableaux of kids playing under a giant mushroom cap, their actions echoing the poem but taking on a life of their own. Under âlittle street little sign little moon little shine,â for example, a child bearing a moon-shaped sign on a stick announces, âHere comes a spare moon.â Later in the book, a bear peeps out of a hole. âHoler-bear is a word in case you are a bear and live in a hole,â one child instructs another, converting what might have been a malapropism (âholer bearâ for âpolar bearâ) into a sensible equation. Some of the pages even suggest Kraussâs politics: âLittle spaghetti little sauce little worker little boss / little worker little wages little book little pages,â a section of the poem reads, revealing a deeper exploration of workersâ rights than the bookâs lullaby rhythms might let on.
The pantoum could keep ballooning ad infinitum, but Krauss concludes by handing it over to the children. The final two quatrains are in much smaller type than the rest: âLittle bee little honey little cook little macaroni / little tail little puppy little coffee little cuppy.â The words appear under the mushroom cap, instead of governing the world from above. The children have captured the rhyme scheme, but they havenât caught on to the logicââlittle cookâ should begin the second set, not âlittle tail.â Itâs a gentle, fitting imperfection; Kraussâs books were never didactic, and her interest was less in moralistic instruction than in the texture of imagination. She explored the world from the bottom up, tending to seeds that are still bearing fruit. â¦