Rebecca Writes

A couple of weeks ago I took a week off regular blogging and reposted edited pieces from an old series of posts on author/illustrators of classic children’s literature. There’s one more, and it didn’t seem right to leave it languishing alone in the archives, so I’m reposting it today. 

Ezra Jack Keats was the first author, some say, to write children’s picture books that take place in an urban setting. I don’t know if he was the first one to give us picture books featuring African-American children as main characters, but he would certainly be one of the first. Do you know Peter, the little boy of The Snow Day and other Ezra Jack Keats stories?

To us, Keats’ Caldecott Award winning The Snowy Day seems like the most uncontroversial of children’s stories, but it wasn’t without critics when it was first published in the early 1960s. The primary complaint was that the book contained stereotypical black characters. I don’t see it. Yes, little Peter’s family lives in the inner city, but Ezra Jack Keats was born and raised in Brooklyn, and lived there almost his whole life. He was simply using the setting he knew best.

Ezra Jack Keats was born to Polish Jewish immigrants on March 11, 1916. His name at birth was Jacob Ezra Katz, but he changed it after WWII because he was afraid anti-Semitism would keep him from succeeding as an artist.

Young Jack was always drawing and his parents were very proud of his artwork, but his father was also concerned that he would need to learn another skill in order to earn an income. So Mr. Katz bought tubes of paint to bring home for his son, but told him he had received them from a starving artist in exchange for a bowl of soup in the coffee shop where he worked. Later, Jack Keats said his father had been “[m]y silent admirer and supplier. He had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work.”