Virginia Lee Burton: An American Classic

A small pink house gradually loses her bucolic setting to urban chaos until, rescued by an ancestor of her original owner, she is happily returned to the countryside. Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House begins with a promise, evolves into a heart-tugging drama, and closes on a pleasing note. A simple story. A simple message. The book, which has touched readers young and old and been revered for a dozen different reasons, has stayed in print for six decades. In today's fast-track cycle from print to out-of-print, its endurance is indeed noteworthy.

Accolades for The Little House (Houghton, 1942) came early and have continued over the years. Writing in the New York Times in 1942, reviewer Anne Eaton mentioned its "lively imagination and genuine power"; the 1943 Caldecott committee selected it as the "most distinguished book of the year"; librarian Anne Carroll Moore, known for her tough criticism, praised it as a "honest-to-goodness picture book"; and it has subsequently appeared on several "best of the century" lists. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Anne Tyler, in a 1986 essay in the New York Times , said that The Little House introduced her to "the realization of the losses that the passage of time can bring." As a child, she liked the book's tone—"quiet but rhythmic"; as an adult, the illustrations "spelled out for me all the successive stages [of time]; the sun rises and sets across one entire page and a whole month of moons wheel across another."

Burton's artwork does invite inspection: circular patterns brim with fluidity, scenes effectively center the action, and characters clearly suggest the emotion of the moment. Her theme—survival through change —never intrudes on the plot, yet it is there for those who delve deeper into the story; it is a theme that Burton returned to again and again in her books. At the time it was published, The Little House comforted children distressed by the uncertainties of World War II. Today, as the book celebrates its 60th anniversary, it embraces today's youngsters, quelling their contemporary fears and challenges. The story of The Little House, however, began long before the book's publication and has meaningful connections to Burton's own life.

Born in Newton Center, MA, in 1909, Virginia (she added the Lee to her name at the suggestion of her high school principal) moved with her family to Carmel, CA, when she was about 10. This artistic community helped cultivate her artistic tendencies, providing Burton and her older sister opportunities to appear in dance recitals and local theatricals. After a year at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and with little interest in attending college, Burton began dance lessons with Muriel Stuart, a onetime student of the famed Pavlova, and art lessons with well-known printmaker Robert Hestwood. When Burton's older sister joined a dance troupe on the East Coast, Virginia accepted an invitation to join them. Then, destiny intervened. Her parents divorced and her father returned to Boston. Soon after, he fell, breaking his leg, and Burton canceled her dance contract. She was, she would later say, the logical one to care for him.

The accident was a fortuitous one for children's literature, as it channeled Burton's interest away from dance and into art and illustration. While helping her father, she taught art at the YMCA and took on some small illustration jobs. Then in 1928, a plum assignment came her way: the Boston Transcript newspaper hired her as a sketcher to accompany its drama critic to theater, music, and dance events, where she was to pictorially interpret performances on paper. Her perceptive quick-action drawings captured the on-stage vitality of such luminaries as conductor Ignacy Paderewski, actress Katherine Cornell, and the Isadora Duncan dancers. Burton's work quickly became known in the area and the Boston Public Library held a highly acclaimed exhibition of her impressionistic drawings, revealing her "gift of catching fleeting action and transforming… it to paper." Burton was 21 years old.

Wanting to further refine her draftsmanship, Burton enrolled in the George Demetrios School of Figure Drawing at the Boston Art Museum. A serendipitous decision: she married her teacher, George Demetrios, six months later. The couple found a house in Folly Cove on Cape Ann, north of Boston, and had it moved back from the busy highway into a field full of daisies and apple trees. It was to be their home for the rest of their lives. A smaller building, moved close to the house's back door, became Burton's studio. The physical and emotional experience of that move inspired her to create, some years later, The Little House . Although the Folly Cove house doesn't structurally resemble the little house of the story, to Burton's mind they were always one and the same.

Burton easily mixed in picnics and parties, gardening, canning, and tending the lambs with time spent with her husband and sons. Still, she always found outlets for her own art. Kitchen walls shone with painted cup-and-saucer trees, a sun smiled down from the ceiling of her sons' bedroom, and her wood carvings decorated her studio. Her talent, however, needed a further challenge, and Burton turned to writing and illustrating a picture book. Jonnifer Lint , her first attempt, never found a publisher, but when Aris, her oldest son, was four she began writing Choo Choo, The Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away (Houghton, 1937). The origin of the story came from the many trips she and her son took to the nearby Rockport train station to watch the trains switching on the Rockport and Maine line. The dedication page features Aris kneeling at center page in the middle of a circular model railroad track. In the background, trains from six different eras circle the page. Choo Choo demonstrates, as would many of her books to follow, that personified machines can be nonconformist and creative—one of Burton's strong beliefs.

Burton involved her sons and their friends in her story writing, changing the plots in tandem with the level of their interest, then altering the illustrations to harmonize and balance the story. She contended that this constant interaction with children was responsible for the success of her books. This proved especially true in her preparation of Calico the Wonder Horse; or, the Saga of Stewy Slinker (Houghton, 1941). Her children's growing fascination with comic books convinced her that a compelling story and an interest-claiming format could captivate them, and she decided to create a story in cartoon format. Burton and her sons dreamed up many disastrous situations, pitting cowboy Hank and his horse, Calico, against the bad guy, Stewy Slinker. When the book was revised in 1950, Burton also changed the villain's name—Stewy Slinker became Stewy Stinker as she had originally intended.

In 1939, Burton published her most famous book, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (Houghton), which has stayed continually in print and has sold more than one million copies in paperback alone. The story of a steam shovel's race to dig a basement for the town hall in Popperville underscores Burton's theme of survival through adjustment. Writing, Burton was quick to admit, was not her strength, and in the middle of this story she found herself stumped. "Mary Anne" had finished the basement and won the race, but Burton had, in her own words, "dug herself into a hole." How was the steam shovel to get out? A good friend's grandson suggested the answer to her problem: make Mary Anne the new town hall's furnace. Grateful to her young friend, Burton acknowledged his contribution in the book, and to this day "acknowledgements to Dickie Birkenbush" (actually Berkenbush; she misspelled his name) appear in every copy of the book. Although Burton illustrated several books for other authors, she found it restrictive not to have total control of the page. When Arna Bontemps requested that Burton illustrate The Fast Sooner Hound (she had earlier illustrated his Sad-Faced Boy), she decided it would be the last book she would illustrate for another author.

Katy and the Big Snow (Houghton, 1943), The Emperor's New Clothes (Houghton, 1949), Maybelle the Cable Car (Houghton, 1952), and Calico the Wonder Horse depict in different ways her adroit use of the page. In each book, her integration of design elements into the illustrations and her deployment of the typeface to bring harmony between text and image stand out. Only in Song of Robin Hood (Houghton, 1947) did she slightly deviate from her determination to work alone.

Anthologist Anne Malcolmson collected the ballads and Grace Castagnetta provided the music; however, the book, four years in the making, was vintage Burton. She researched 12th-century English plants and flowers, studied old tapestries and parchments, and corralled her sons to pose in costume to ensure accuracy. Her usual intricate and meticulous attention to detail increased as she worked to provide a unique presentation for each ballad. Because of its delicate images, the production was a challenge. Jean Poindexter Colby, the Houghton Mifflin editor in charge of production, related in a 1948 Horn Book article that she and Burton spent so much time in the press room that the printers laughingly suggested they should pay union dues! All the work and attention proved worthwhile: the book received a Caldecott Honor citation. Long out of print, it was reprinted from the original illustrations in 2001. Song of Robin Hood also provided Burton with the opportunity to develop and practice her growing interest in theories of design.

For some years, amid creating her 13 children's books, Burton had become the mentor and unofficial leader of a group known as the Folly Cove Designers. Instigated by one of Burton's friends, this casual group of neighbors evolved into a collective of highly skilled craftsmen who concentrated on textile designs. Each person chose a design that was painstakingly worked out on paper, precisely carved into a linoleum block, carefully inked, and only then printed onto fabric. Burton demanded that the finished product reflect the work of the individual who created it, apparent in Burton's own designs.

For a few short years, the work of the Folly Cove Designers was lauded nationally, sold voluminously, became the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, and was advertised as "a new direction in fabric design" in Lord & Taylor ads in the New York Times . It was even read into the Congressional Record as an example of topnotch entrepreneurship. When Burton died the group disbanded and, sadly, examples of their work are found now only in the hands of a few collectors and at the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester, MA.

Burton's last book, Life Story (Houghton, 1962), might well be called her most ambitious effort: work on this geologic history of the world took eight years. She spent many days at New York's Museum of Natural History, where she made to-scale drawings from museum specimens, using a figure of a man to show comparative sizes. Examples of her perfectionism in Life Story can be seen in the Philadelphia Free Library archives where, for example, eight to 10 full-color renditions of a single page show the sometimes slight, sometimes major, changes she made to an illustration. Burton effectively and cleverly dramatized the story through a five-act play with the action unfolding on stage under the tutelage of several narrators.

The most fascinating part of Life Story, however, is the last 25 pages, where Burton introduces readers to her home and life in Folly Cove. Seasonal presentations picture her house, her close-by studio, her family picking apples and mowing the lawn, and Jinnee, as Burton was called by all who knew her, fetching the mail, shoveling snow, and painting at an easel. In some respects, Life Story is Burton's continued exploration of the theme—survival through change—introduced in The Little House, yet told on a grander scale.

Burton died in October 1968, but her books and her legend live on. Her husband carved a beautiful bronze statue of her before his death five years later, which unfortunately is not available for public viewing. Her sons tried to interest Morton Schindel in a video biography and thoughts emerged about turning the house into a Little House Museum, showcasing Burton's work, but nothing came of either idea. With her sons busy with their lives in California, the Folly Cove property endured a series of renters until the fall of 2000, when the decision was made to sell the property.

A recent visit to her studio before the house and studio were sold was akin to entering a time slip, eliciting a feeling that Burton would appear at any time to retrieve one item or another and carry on the work of her day. Dust fell from opened file drawers, sagging bookshelves, and nooks and crannies that hadn't been touched in years. Jammed here and there were family letters; correspondence to publishers (often decorated with humorous pictures of herself at work); catalogs of Folly Cove design exhibitions; sketchbooks full of visual ideas, daily appointments, grocery needs, Christmas gift lists; and even a funny birthday card she had made for her husband.

Among the accumulation were some amazing finds: a mock-up of Maybelle the Cable Car , complete with her pencil notations and glued-in illustrations, and a manila envelope holding an original illustration used in preparation for her drawings in Sad-Faced Boy . Also among the shelves was a soiled paperback of a little-known songbook she had illustrated in 1934—Fairies and Friendly Folk by Mary Bacon Mason—as well as an adult book, Handbook of American Mountaineering by Ken Henderson. While the illustrations in the latter title are certainly Burton's, mysteriously, she is not credited for them anywhere in the book.

Rows of books on art, music, and ballet, used in her research, stand alongside titles about Robin Hood, cable cars, English flowers and plants, trains, and machinery. Drawers yielded yards of Folly Cove fabrics and boxes of linoleum blocks, carved in her distinctive style. Copies of the family's annual Christmas cards that she designed were scattered across the top of the old printing press used in her Folly Cove work. Seeing remnants from Burton's life and work gave a brief but vivid glimpse of her artistic vision.

On the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Little House, Burton's place in children's literature remains secure. And the "Little House" of the story, saved from destitution and transported to a hillside full of flowers and trees, remains a symbol of hope, personifying the joy and love of life that was so much a part of Virginia Lee Burton and which she gave to children through her books.

An exhibit of Virginia Lee Burton's original art and illustrations will be on display at the Haggerty Museum of Art on Marquette University's campus in Milwaukee, WI, from October 11 through December 8, 2002.