The handclapping and cheering went on even after the lion fell off the table and lay on the floor again and it continued until everyone forgot who the applause was for or what it was he was famous for having done.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, Ellen’s Lion (1959)
In the decades since their deaths, Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson have receded in the public memory, she more quickly than he. Where once her poetic and dramatic achievements ranked among the best of the contemporary avant-garde, they are today a footnote to her better-known career as children’s author. That career, too, does not shine as brightly as it once did. All of her poetry is out of print, and less than a dozen of her thirty-six children’s books remain available.
However, new editions of some of her books have been published. The Bundle Book (1951) gained new life as You’re Just What I Need (illustrated by Julia Noonan, 1999); Eyes Nose Fingers Toes (1964) returned as Goodnight Goodnight Sleepyhead (illustrated by Jane Dyer, 2004); and Big and Little reappeared as And I Love You (illustrated by Steven Kellogg, 2010). In 2005, Maurice Sendak reworked Bears (1948), using new pictures featuring Max from Where the Wild Things Are to create a story that runs parallel to and intersects with Krauss’s original verse. He dedicated the new volume to Krauss and Johnson. In 2007, Helen Oxenbury’s art gave a fresh look to The Growing Story (1947), and the New York Review of Books’ Children’s Books imprint brought The Backward Day (1950) back into print.
While these republications augur well for Krauss’s literary legacy, Johnson has far better name recognition for two reasons. First, his comic garners much more respect than her poetry. Barnaby ranks among the twentieth century’s classic comic strips, alongside Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Moreover, Barnaby has prominent fans ready to speak on its behalf. Pulitzer Prize–winner Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly included Barnaby in the second of their three-volume Little Lit series (2000–2003). Daniel Clowes, best known for his Ghost World graphic novel (1997) and film (2001), frequently cites the strip as a favorite, even alluding to Barnaby in his graphic novel, Ice Haven (2005). Though the Comics Journal ranked Barnaby only at number 68 in its Top 100 Comics of the twentieth century, the issue’s cover featured two Barnaby characters, O’Malley and Gus the Ghost.1
The second reason for Johnson’s endurance is Harold and the Purple Crayon, which has sold more than two million copies and been translated into fourteen languages. It and its sequels have inspired an Emmy-winning animated HBO series (2001–2), a board game (2001), and a new stage play (2009). Many creative people, including cartoonist Peter Kuper and children’s author-illustrators William Joyce and Thacher Hurd, also cite Harold as an inspiration. Harold is the ancestor of the crayon-wielding protagonists in Chris Van Allsburg’s Bad Day at Riverbend (1995) and Patrick McDonnell’s Art (2006) and the pencil-powered characters in Anthony Browne’s Bear Hunt (1979) and Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman’s The Pencil (2008). In a February 2009 Sunday Zits comic, Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman show Connie Duncan finding a box of her son Jeremy’s old picture books, with five of the strip’s seven panels devoted to Harold and the Purple Crayon. Though Jeremy usually displays a teenager’s reluctance to hang out with his parents, he happily recalls the book’s plot with his mother. In the final panel, he has become a child waiting for story time: His gangly adolescent body rests in his mother’s lap, she holds the book in her hands, and he says, “Start from the beginning.”2
Crockett Johnson shows us that a crayon can create a world, while Ruth Krauss demonstrates that dreams can be as large as a giant orange carrot. Whenever children and grown-ups seek books that invite them to think and to imagine, they need look no further than Johnson and Krauss. There, they will find a very special house, where holes are to dig, walls are a canvas, and people are artists, drawing paths that take them anywhere they want to go.