The picture book came of age in the United States during the 1930s as the nation was recovering from the Great Depression. Americans, until then, had looked primarily to Europe for culture and to England in particular for the finest examples of illustrated books for the young. Picture books by British artists Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, Beatrix Potter, and L. Leslie Brooke filled library shelves alongside those created by a small but growing number of American illustrators, including E. Boyd Smith, C. B. Falls, Wanda Gág, and Robert Lawson. As America’s industrial might grew, so did the conviction that the time had come for American illustrators to rise to the challenge of matching, or even surpassing, the high standard set by artists from across the Atlantic. It was with this ambitious goal in mind that in 1937 the American Library Association established a prize for illustration and named it the Randolph Caldecott Medal after the greatest of England’s picture-book masters.

In 1942, Robert McCloskey became only the fifth illustrator to be honored with a Caldecott Medal. It is amusing to learn that when McCloskey’s editor, May Massee of Viking Press, telephoned him with the good news, the creator of Make Way for Ducklings had to ask her to explain just what it was that he should be so happy about. He had not yet heard of the medal. The episode suggests the degree to which the American children’s-book world of the 1930s and ’40s remained a young and insular cottage industry. Few of the major illustrators of McCloskey’s generation started out with dreams of making their names as juvenile artists. Most wandered into the field by chance. McCloskey, for instance, had wanted a career as a muralist and painter. But he needed to make a living, and because his best friend happened to be May Massee’s nephew, he had shown his portfolio to her. The editor, who immediately recognized his promise, gave him encouragement and a thoughtful critique. Then, sealing his loyalty to her for life, she took the young artist out to dinner.

By the time Maurice Sendak arrived on the scene less than a generation later, the situation in America had changed dramatically. Exhausted by years of depression and war, parents of the 1950s baby boom era were determined to give their children a happier, more opportunity-rich childhood than the one they themselves had experienced. They bought large numbers of books for their youngsters and supported the funding of public schools and libraries — the two institutions that between them purchased the lion’s share of American children’s books. As the field flourished, the status of illustrators rose. In 1963, when Sendak’s Caldecott Medal–winning Where the Wild Things Are first appeared, an appreciative public was prepared to hail it as a masterpiece (albeit a somewhat controversial one, with its young tantrum-throwing boy and half-scary, half-goofy alter egos) and its creator as a pop-cultural hero.

Sendak’s triumph added immeasurably to the forward momentum of the picture book as an art form. On both sides of the Atlantic, more and more talented young people entered the field, among them England’s Quentin Blake and John Burningham, soon to be joined by the latter’s wife, Helen Oxenbury, and by a brilliant young Austrian artist named Lisbeth Zwerger. American publishers were belatedly coming to grips with the multicultural and multiracial makeup of American society — and with their responsibility to publish for underserved minorities. Catalyzed by the civil rights movement, the new awareness of those years opened unprecedented opportunities to artists of color such as Ashley Bryan and Jerry Pinkney.

Such was the excitement and prestige surrounding picture books that even highly accomplished illustrators like Eric Carle (then a successful advertising artist) and New Yorker cartoonist William Steig might decide, in mid-career, to turn to the picture book as a worthy outlet for their talents. Carle took the leap in reaction to his growing disenchantment with the world of selling. To supplement his magazine income, Steig too had been designing ads, and he too had come to long for more satisfying work. In 1969, Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (which received the Caldecott Medal for 1970) and Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar both were published — landmark picture books that have not only delighted countless children but also inspired new generations of illustrators.

Carle’s name became synonymous with a type of picture book for which there were few historical precedents: books for children even younger than those of the traditional “picture-book ages” of four to eight; books that often had built-in novelty or “toylike” elements. His relatively brief, read-aloud stories introduced basic concepts such as counting and the days of the week in a playful way, as much by “showing” as by “telling.” At first, America’s public libraries, which had not yet committed themselves to serving the needs of toddlers and preschoolers, had no use for Carle’s books. But a new generation of parents quickly discovered them for themselves, as did educators at the preschools and day-care centers that were opening everywhere. As the growing demand for such “young” picture books became increasingly clear, more artists began to create them — including one American photographer who earlier in her career had specialized in making photographic portraits of children, Tana Hoban. So too did an energetic young book designer at a Boston educational publishing house named Rosemary Wells. During the 1980s, Wells and Helen Oxenbury each produced memorable baby and toddler books salted with developmental insight, wry humor, and well-placed, knowing nods to the difficulties of being a good parent. Together, they popularized the board book as the ideal format for the youngest children, those who were as apt to yank and bite their books as look at them.

By then, children’s-book publishing had become international in scope and flavor, with publishers from many countries sharing an eagerness to expose their children to books and ideas from other cultures. Japanese author and illustrator Mitsumasa Anno first became known to American readers in 1970 with the publication of Topsy-Turvies: Pictures to Stretch the Imagination. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, his extraordinary picture books attracted an ever wider international audience. Like Eric Carle, Anno won fans among educators and librarians for being a gentle teacher with a genius for transforming learning into an absorbing and seemingly effortless game.

It took American critics a long time to grasp the special achievement of picture books as “simple” as Carle’s; not surprisingly, Carle has not won the Caldecott Medal. Another popular American artist whose picture books were long underrated by critics, in his case because the books were so funny, was James Marshall. A largely self-taught artist, Marshall was inspired to create children’s books after discovering the work of Sendak, Tomi Ungerer, and Edward Gorey. Although less of a technical wizard than any of these role models, Marshall nonetheless mastered his own idiosyncratic approach to drawing and design, and developed a signature line that harmonized perfectly with his archly witty voice. Sendak himself would later express his envy of the lightness and mischief of Marshall’s drawings. The endlessly amusing rogues’ gallery of Marshall’s characters — George and Martha, Miss Nelson, Viola Swamp, Fox, and others — have the enduring distinction of being both funny and true. Awards committees recognized Marshall’s worth later than children did. In 1992, with dozens of books to his credit, he finally received a Caldecott Honor (a runner-up prize to the medal) for Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In 2007 the American Library Association posthumously awarded him its Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for illustration in recognition of the entire body of his work.

As the millennium approached, the first generation of readers of Where the Wild Things Are, now parents themselves, made Max a popular name choice for a newborn boy; museum exhibitions of picture-book art, though still rare, were becoming less so, and a new wave of museums devoted entirely to children’s-book art were opening their doors or were about to do so; art schools were introducing courses in children’s-book illustration; and a whole generation of young artists were passionately committing themselves to the field, having themselves grown up on Sendak, Steig, Burningham, and company. The territory now being explored by such notable artists as Lois Ehlert and Vera B. Williams, the latter a painter and printmaker who had studied with Josef Albers, had fewer of the makeshift trappings of a frontier than had been the case a generation earlier, and more the look and substance of a thriving creative and commercial enterprise. Kevin Henkes, Chris Raschka, Yumi Heo (a Korean émigré), Peter Sís (a Czech artist who sought asylum in the United States during the last years of the Cold War), and animator Mo Willems all carved out unique niches for themselves in a world and marketplace that seemed more receptive than ever to whatever an artist with a talent for reaching one-, or three-, or seven-year-olds might have to offer. Meanwhile, as new technologies stood poised to supplant entire genres of traditional print-on-paper books with quicksilver screen equivalents, the future of the picture book remained comparatively secure — even as digitized picture books joined the mix. Artists seemed likelier than ever to devise new ways to tap the distinctive potential of the traditional picture book as an extraordinarily flexible and child-friendly format. Parents and caregivers seemed as likely as ever to prize the intimate tactile experience of holding an illustrated book in hand while perching a young child on their lap, the adult and child basking together in the magical yet familiar glow of a good story shared.

In each of these interviews, I am on a kind of mad quest for the vital thread that links an artist’s life story to the stories and images for which he or she is known. How does a young person grow up to become an artist? What childhood experiences prepared these particular twenty-one men and women — or left them unprepared — for what was to come in their creative lives? What was it that inspired them, and where did they find the courage they required, and who gave them the help and guidance that sent them on their way? And why of all art forms did they choose the picture book to be their life’s work and passion?

I hope these interviews, each of which is a honeycomb of memorable tales about growing up and coming into one’s own, will inspire young people, especially those who like to paint and write and draw, as well as working artists at every stage of their career. I hope as well that teachers, librarians, parents, book collectors, and others who care about children and their books will find in these pages new insights into the mysterious process of artistic creation, and a fuller appreciation of an art form that is almost never as simple as it seems.