![]() My mother also likes to sit and smell the flowers so perhaps that is why she read it so frequently to my sister and me. I don’t remember a time before I knew Ferdinand. One example of Lawson’s sense of humor is that he drew corks growing from the cork tree in Ferdinand. ![]() ![]() Illustrator Lawson won the Caldecott in 1941 for They Were Strong and Good, a story about his forbears: “None of them,” he says, “were great or famous, but they were strong and good.” In 1945, he won the Newbery Medal for Rabbit Hill, which I often saw at the library but never felt impelled to read it, not being a big fan of animal books. ![]() He worked in publishing himself and had written the story in less than an hour on a yellow legal pad, intending for his friend Robert Lawson to illustrate it because Lawson felt he was feeling limited by publishers. Leaf protested he only wrote the story to entertain. It was banned in Spain, “burned as propaganda by Hitler, and labeled in America as promoting fascism, anarchism, and communism.” Others saw it as a symbol of pacifism. ![]() My Impression: Anita Silvey in Children’s Books and Their Creators describes how The Story of Ferdinand created a global controversy as one of the first picture books to be considered subversive. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |