1942: Literature, Children's

Spring Prize-Winners.

Publishing for children no longer begins, as in former years, just early enough in autumn to create a literary log-jam before Christmas, but opens almost as soon as the year itself, continues steadily month by month, and rises first to the peak of the Children's Spring Book Festival in May, and then in November to the plateau of Children's Book Week. On the former occasion, annually sponsored by the New York Herald-Tribune, three prizes, awarded by well-known authorities on juvenile literature, are made to the best spring publication in each of three classifications of age: older young folks, children under twelve, and little folks of picture-book age. The prize in the first category was won by a romance of the Sea Beggars, None But the Brave, by Rosamond Van der Zee Marshall, whose vigorous account of the resistance of the Dutch to Spanish aggressors at the time of the Siege of Leyden had direct bearing upon contemporary underground patriotism in Europe. The honor books chosen by the judges in this class were Christine Noble Govan's Carolina Caravan, story of an orphaned family whose lack of money did not hamper appreciation of life; Street of Ships, by Charles M. Dougherty, around New York's harbor in clipper ship days; They Loved to Laugh, by Kathryn Worth, a Quaker family teaching a sensitive girl to give and take jokes; and War Horse, by Fairfax Downey, a story of the first World War whose pictures were drawn by Paul Brown. The prize book for the middle group was a story-biography of John Paul Jones, 'I Have Just Begun to Fight!', by Commander Edward Ellsberg — absent, like many of the year's writers of juveniles, on duty with the armed forces. The honor books included a tale of medieval life in England, Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Grey; a collection of Mexican folk tales, The Boy Who Could Do Everything, told by Anita Brenner and given distinctive decorations by Jean Charlot; Lions on the Hunt, by Theodore Waldeck, a realistic account of life on the African veldt; and Steppin and Family, by Hope Newell, Harlem as the home of a Negro boy with a gift for step-dancing. The picture-book prize was won by Mr. Tootwhistle's Invention, words and-colored pictures by Peter Wells, a jolly extravaganza on railroad history. The honor books in this class were John Hooper's Johnny Jump-Up, a young driver bringing through a team from Bucksport to Castine, Me.; Whitey's First Round-Up, by Glen Rounds, one of a group of successful experiments in low-cost production; Dudley Henry Morris's The Truck That Flew, which later was made into a movie; and Frances Neilson's The Donkey from Dorking, pictures by Lydia Vitale and Janet Hopkins, a merry costermonger story that though by an American was so true to life and local color that later in the year it was highly popular in an English edition.

Medal-Winners.

The Newbery Medal awarded in 1942 for the best children's book of the preceding year went to a story of frontier Indian raids, truly a thriller: The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds, with fine colored pictures by Paul Lantz. The same author and artist scored in 1942 with Tom Whipple, retold version of an early American 'success story,' with large color lithographs in the manner of the period. The Caldecott Prize awarded in 1942 for the best picture-book of 1941 went to Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, whose large lithograph drawings have a Boston background. The Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation's annual award went to a pioneer story, Journey Cake, by Isabel McLennan McMeekin, well-known among writers of adult fiction as one of the team writing under the pseudonym of Clark McMeekin; the drawings were by Nicholas Panesis.

War Books for Little Children.

It was soon clear that on the subject of war as affecting children's books there would be a cleavage naturally to be expected at the outset of our preparations, and coming, on both sides, from deep and sympathetic concern with the welfare of children. On one side were those) who held that war should not enter at all into books for children, which they held should preserve for them a world apart from present conditions. On the other were those who believed that with the human race involved in global war and children part of the human race, it would be as easy to keep them out of war as out of the solar system. Children themselves, if their favorite games meant anything, seemed to side with the latter. Even little children welcomed Munro Leaf's amusing but thoroughly practical Wartime Handbook for Young Americans, found in Hortense Flexner's The Wishing Window enlightenment without terror on what happened to some other little children in France, and in Alice Dalgliesh's Gulliver-Joins the Army, recognized their own adjustments to war conditions in a typical suburb. It is now greatly to the advantage both of our children and of their books that so many of our authors take into account the lucidity of mind in early years, later confused by the rush of new experiences, that makes it possible for young children to take in, without reasoning, abstract ideas of the utmost importance to their latter development. Thus The Secret of the Ancient Oak, by the artist-author known as Wolo, expressed basic values for which we fight, in terms of little forest animals defending their tree. But the finest example of confidence that the vibrations of pure patriotism can reach even six-year-olds if they come directly to the eye and ear, was in the handsomest picture-book of the year, The Star-Spangled Banner, large colored lithographs by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, interpreting the stanzas of our national anthem.

Picture-Books.

For the most part, the share of picture-books in our war effort was in strengthening home ties and a sense of the value of the way of life we defend. Jesus' Story, color plates by Maud and Miska Petersham, adapted to words from the New Testament, was one of the fall's most popular picture-books, and those prepared especially for Christmas this year were well aware of its significance as a religious festival; in Ferencz Molnar's touching fantasy, The Blue Eyed Lady, there were even real angels. Animal books, always appealing to a little child's protective sympathies, gave him this year, in Clare Turlay Newberry's Marshmallow, the alliance of a rabbit and a disconcerted middle-aged cat; Margot Austin's Gabriel Churchkitten and Pancho and the Bull with the Crooked Tail, by Berta and Elmer Hader were disarmingly funny; Dash and Dart, by Conrad and Mary Buff, with lithographs and lyric prose, brought children into the forest's heart and the life of two fawns. The Animal Book by Dorothy and Nils Hogner and At the Seashore by W. W. and Irene Robinson had lively and reliable color plates. Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House made gay pictures of a changing neighborhood, and her illustrations for The Fast-Sooner Hound by Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, heighted a merry folk-tale. One of the major events of the year was the publication of Walter de la Mare's poems Bells and Grass, while his story, Mr. Bumps and His Monkey, with colored lithographs by Dorothy Lathrop, went deeper into the meaning of human life than any other tale of which an animal was the hero.

War Books for Young Folks.

There were, however, plenty of books in which war, somewhere in the world today, entered the picture. The most striking was among those for older boys; John R. Tunis's All-American, a school-sport story of the best type, faced squarely up to vital issues of race discrimination that American youth must face now and in a postwar world. Marie McSwigan's Snow Treasure showed children helping to keep up resistance in Norway, and Sigrid Undset's Happy Days in Norway, though describing home life before the invasion of the Nazis, made clear in a burning foreword what that coming had cost. Josephine Blackstock's Wings for Nikias brought into the war a lad in Greece; Eleanor Lattimore's Questions of Lifu, a little chap in China. The tendency of our children's books to introduce young Americans to little folks in other lands took on new vitality: such books this year were about children in nations united with us in a world effort, so that from Pearl Buck's story for little children about The Chinese Children Next Door, and Theresa Kalab's English boy and his carrier pigeon in Watching for Winkie, to Antoni Gronowicz's Bolek in the invasion of Poland, there was a sense of 'we're all in this together.'

Illustration and Fantasy.

Color was treasured and appreciated this year, perhaps because difficulties in production had already sharply set in. Feodor Rojankovsky's brilliant hues and robust treatment of children's faces and of animals distinguished two new editions, Kipling's Just So Stories and The Tall Book of Mother Goose. Gustaf Tenggren's full-color imaginative illustrations for Katherine Gibson's retelling of little novels for the nursery were in The Tenggren Tell-it-again Book. Clement Hurd's color pictures distinguished The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown's adaptation of an old folk-rhyme to babies anywhere, and Marguerite de Angeli's color plates heightened her story of foreign-born Americans, Up the Hill. Black-and-white came to its own in C. W. Anderson's large lithographs of race horses in Thoroughbreds, Wesley Dennis's Flip and the Cows, and in a fantasy by C. E. Forester, Poo-Poo and the Dragons, in which Robert Lawson's jolly drawings domesticated these creatures in an English village. There were other fantasies: in Twig, by Elizabeth Orton Jones, a child created her fairyland in a tenement court; Andrew Lang's Prince Prigio was revived with delightful Lawson drawings, and Helen Sewell illustrated a new selection from Bulfinch as A Book of Myths. In Hi-po the Hippo, by Dorothy Thomas, fantasy joined burlesque in some of the most distinguished of recent colored lithographs, by Ruth Gannett. Tree-in-the-Trail by Holling C. Holling, pictured history in our Southwest in living hues, and Arensa Sondergaard and Fritz Kredel's My First Geography of the Americas gave a beginner of any age a pictorial sweep, in color, of both continents.

Home Life Tales.

Family life in America today inspired some of the best stories: Eleanor Estes's The Middle Moffat, taken with The Moffats, comes nearer than any other American story for ten-year-olds to approximating a contemporary equivalent of Little Women, Elizabeth Enright's The Four-Story Mistake has true American family spirit; and in The Hill of Little Miracles Valenti Angelo enriches this literature with the exploits of Italo-Americans on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. Muriel Denison's Happy Tramps brought a girl and her prize sheep-dog from England for the duration; Phil Stong's Way Down Cellar was a small-boy secret society in Connecticut. Katherine Milhous' Herodia, the Lovely Puppet, with her own color illustrations, is an American period piece. So, too, Mabel Leigh Hunt's Have You Seen Tom Thumb? with Fritz Eichenberg's decorations, is a sympathetic study of Charles Stratton and Barnum.

Biography.

Biography for young people, now so well developed here that its best examples are recommended to adult beginners, set a new standard this year in Leo Lerman's Michelangelo: a Renaissance Profile, an evocation of the time and the man, whose many illustrations were chiefly photographs of his works. Covelle Newcomb's life of Cervantes, Vagabond in Velvet; Alice Curtis Desmond's full-length portrait, Martha Washington, our First Lady; The Man Who Dared to Care, by Mary Tarver Carroll, an inspiring life of James Oglethorpe; William O. Stevens's panorama of naval history in David Glasgow Farragut; and Helen Nicolay's personalized period history, Decatur of the Old Navy, presented famous personages to the teens, while a group of American characters not so familiar included Shooting Star, William E. Watson's life of Tecumseh; Howard Fast's Goethals; Alden Hatch's Glenn Curtiss; Shannon Garst's Kit Carson; and Leslie Allen Jones's Eli Terry, Clockmaker of Connecticut. Indeed, in this field we are faced with the possibility not of under-supply, but of over-production; the use of dialogue — save in those meant for the older teens — preserves the quality of narrative, but in all the better examples the authentication has been more careful than that of most 'fictionized biographies' for adults.

Miscellaneous.

Among stories for young folks over twelve we had the thoroughly reliable Recruit for Abe Lincoln by Maribelle Cormack; William S. Resnick's Dragon Ship and Catherine Cate Coblentz's Falcon of Eric the Red, romances of Viking settlement; New Town in Texas by Siddie Joe Johnson; The Blue Hills by Elizabeth Goudge, which was welcomed by any age because it brought back a favorite heroine; Phyllis Crawford's Last Semester, a college story; Elizabeth Foreman Lewis's timely story of China, When the Typhoon Blows; a sympathetic fictionization of the life of H. C. Andersen, Julian David's The Three Hanses; Missee Lee, an unexpected pirate story by the favorite English author Arthur Ransome; Hubert Skidmore's realistic Hill Lawyer; Erick Berry's historical Hudson Frontier; Kitty Barnes's May I Keep Dogs? a wartime story from England; and Howard Fast's Tall Hunter, introducing Johnny Appleseed.

No effort has been made to confine this review to books written by Americans: works from overseas, especially those originally written in English, form part of our children's libraries. One picture-book feature, however, did not cross the ocean from England, where it was a distinctive phenomenon of attempted invasion save in treasured copies in the collection of 'Books Across the Sea': this was the emergence of the barrage balloon as a new character in fiction, something between a sort of secular guardian angel and a flying elephant such as Walt Disney creates. It is possible that the highly popular London storybooks The Adventures of Johnny Balloon, Nelson the King's Kite, Bulgy or Blassom the Brave Balloon will figure in historical collections of the future as records of the adjustment of little children to the conditions of war.