Children's Literature
Parallel Lives
-- School Library Journal, 11/8/2007
The titles below examine concurrent 20th-century movements in children’s literature.
Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature (Greenwood, 2007).
In covering the history of literature written by African Americans for children, Rudine Sims Bishop begins with the years prior to 1900 and a discussion of the oral culture that thrived in slave quarters. She considers the black community’s drive toward “literacy and liberation,” and the efforts of W. E. B. Du Bois, through The Brownies’ Book magazine, to create a literature that spoke to all youth. Later chapters consider the ground-breaking work of Arna Bontemps; the availability of children’s poetry in the 1940s and 1950s; and the literary and artistic renaissance that began in the late 1960s and brought Lucille Clifton, Eloise Greenfield, Mildred D. Taylor, John Steptoe, Patricia McKissack, Donald Crews, Tom Feelings, and numerous other talented authors and illustrators to the attention of the general public. Her discussions of contemporary fiction include the work of Jacqueline Woodson, Christopher Paul Curtis, Walter Dean Myers, and Angela Johnson. Bishop's scholarship and her thoughtful analyses are sure to make this a standard text in children’s literature classes and will be appreciated by anyone who shares books with children.
Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon along the Way (Random/Golden Books, 2007).
Long before mega-bookstores dotted our landscape, Golden Books, purchased in five-and-dimes and supermarkets across the nation, filled the book shelves of children fortunate to have home libraries. In chronicling the proliferation of these inexpensive books, Leonard Marcus offers an absorbing account of the convergence of events and personalities that made Golden Books a household item. At one time or another such notable entrepreneurs, writers, and illustrators as Richard Simon, Max Schuster, Margaret Wise Brown, Feodor Rojankovsky, Gustaf Tenggren, and Garth Williams contributed to the growth of this publishing phenomenon, and Marcus’s discussion of their involvement never fails to entertain. Educators will be particularly interested in reading about the schools of thought that kept teachers and librarians (Bank Street vs. New York Public) at odds over what was appropriate reading material for young children. This illuminating and carefully researched title, profusely illustrated with full-color illustrations, will be a walk down memory lane for many readers.
