The Man Who Became Keats

Ezra Jack Keats may have written crackling and elegant prose, but his art was clearly what got him out of bed in the morning. Patterns and textures and nuanced figures don't dance like that if art isn't in your veins. No doubt it would have pleased him that this year, for the first time, the Ezra Jack Keats Award will be presented not only to a new writer, but to a new illustrator as well. That Keats knew precisely what it took to deliver a cohesive, meaningful, positive, and artistic book makes the recognition of an illustrator all the more satisfying.

When I was invited to join the award selection committee, I felt it was an honor as well as a challenge. The award, I learned, is intended to encourage a writer and an illustrator who have had no more than five books published. (This year's new writer award went to D. B. Johnson, who wrote and illustrated Henry Hikes to Fitchburg [Houghton, 2000], while Bryan Collier, author and illustrator of Uptown [Holt, 2000], received the new illustrator award.) Among the coveted honors for children's books, the Ezra Jack Keats Award strikes me as a good-spirited thumbs up from one artist to another. But while considering what a generous gesture the award represented, I realized that I actually knew very little about the man who established it.

I never met Keats. I've known his work, certainly, and even done library programs all over New York City that were made possible by his foundation. I've done a program in the Ezra Jack Keats room of a library in Ohio and once visited the de Grummond Collection in Mississippi, where his work is archived. But I wasn't fully aware of the profound effect he has had on the world of children's books.

Given an opportunity to reflect upon Keats's legacy, I expected to find long lists of honors and awards and pages of commentary on the industry-wide appreciation his work had earned. And what honors and awards there were! A bronze statue of Peter (protagonist of Whistle for Willie and other stories), his chair, and his dog, Willie, stands in Brooklyn, NY's Prospect Park; a roller-skating rink in Tokyo is named in Keats's honor; and film versions of his books have been celebrated from Venice to Teheran. But I also discovered something surprisingly touching: the man behind the award had a passion for art and a compassion for people that keep his artistry vividly alive, even 18 years after his death.

Jacob Ezra Katz was born in 1916, the youngest of three children. His parents, Polish immigrants of Jewish descent, made their home amid the tenements of a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood that provided the gritty backdrop for Keats's childhood. Visually, that world seems to have soaked into him, reappearing later in his books as an urban landscape gone painterly. Rooftops and darkened windows, crumbling plaster and brick walls never looked so good.

That Keats was an artist at an early age is clear. He was drawing before he entered school and, at the age of eight, he earned a quarter for painting a sign for a local store. It wasn't exactly the type of painting that he preferred to do, but bringing home 25 cents in hard times meant something. It certainly seemed to impress his father, Benjamin Katz, who actively discouraged Ezra's passion for painting. He firmly believed that there was no future in art for his son. Working as a waiter at a Greenwich Village coffee shop, Katz had seen his share of poor artists and didn't hesitate to cite them as reasons to develop a more practical skill. "If you don't think artists starve, well, let me tell you…," he would warn Ezra.

Still, Katz would bring home an occasional tube of paint for young Ezra, delivering it with the explanation that yet another hungry artist had traded it for a bowl of soup that day. Once, however, he came home with a package of inexpensive brushes that Ezra suspected had been taken from a child's paint set. It was the first hint that his father might be buying supplies for him, because no professional artist would have ever used such brushes. Realizing what it meant for his father to spend his meager earnings on art supplies must have lessened the impact of those "starving artist" tales. Still, his father's antagonistic attitude toward a career in art continued.

There was a purity in Keats's desire to be an artist that comes across in stories told about him. One of his former high school teachers, Florence B. Freedman, described the "tall skinny, quiet boy in the last row, last seat" who passionately defended Silas Marner to his English classmates. He claimed to understand Marner's hoarding of gold coins because he, Keats, also hoarded something he found beautiful: tubes of oil paint so precious to him that he wouldn't use them until he felt he was good enough as an artist. Hearing him insist that Marner was not a miser but, rather, was obsessed with beauty, Freedman realized that there was an artist in their midst.

The kitchen in the Katz family's small Brooklyn apartment was a haven for troubled neighbors, family, and friends. In Keats's paintings during those years, what captured his attention were the homeless men he saw huddled around a fire, the empty lots under gray and stormy skies, and the somber views from his window.

The day before Keats graduated from high school, his father fell dead in the street of a heart attack. It was Keats who was called upon to identify the body. He described the experience in the acceptance speech he gave upon receiving the 1963 Caldecott Medal for The Snowy Day (Crowell, 1962): "As part of the procedure, the police asked me to look through his wallet. I found myself staring deep into his secret feelings. There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won. My silent admirer and supplier—torn between dread of my leading a life of hardship and real pride in my work."

Hardship was always a factor in Keats's early life. He had been unable to accept any of the scholarships that were offered to him after he graduated; money was so tight that he had to go to work to help support his family. At night, whenever possible, he took art classes. For a time he studied with Jackson Pollock and, having watched the artist toss pieces of his work into the trash, Keats later quipped to one of his friends, the writer Fran Manushkin, that he should have gathered up those crumpled rejects when he'd had the chance. Keats was able to find a range of art jobs. He painted murals with the Works Progress Administration and even helped to illustrate the Captain Marvel comic strip. After designing camouflage patterns for the army during World War II, he spent a year in Paris, able at last to focus on his fine art paintings. When he returned to America, he exhibited his work, selling his paintings through Fifth Avenue shops and doing commercial illustrations for popular magazines and newspapers.

Two years after the war, facing anti-Semitic prejudices that might have threatened his ability to make a living, Jacob Ezra Katz legally became Ezra Jack Keats. It was at Reader's Digest that he was advised that "Keats would look better on the credits," another friend, the author Esther Hautzig, says. She had known him as "Jack" since her days as a publicist for Thomas Y. Crowell Publishers, where he had illustrated his first children's book. She knew him well enough to know that living through the Depression had left him with an intense need for a secure income.

Nothing seems to capture the humanity at the core of Ezra Jack Keats's work better than the story surrounding The Snowy Day. According to the recollections of friends and colleagues, the book represented a breakthrough for Keats. "He felt that he was in a bind and wanted to do something different," his friend Lee Bennett Hopkins recalls. Indeed, the story of this one pivotal book offers possibly the best glimpse into what motivated his work, his life, and even his desire to endow a foundation after his death.

"He wrote and illustrated The Snowy Day while he was living at the Picasso, an apartment building on East 58th Street in Manhattan," says Manushkin. "He really got a kick out of living in that building because of its name." On and off over time, a series of Life magazine photographs from 1940 of a small black boy had graced the wall near his drawing table. These pictures became the inspiration for Peter.

"Then began an experience that turned my life around— working on a book with a black kid as hero," Keats wrote. "None of the manuscripts I'd been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along." Like the Puerto Rican protagonist in the previous book that he illustrated, My Dog Is Lost!; ¡Mi Perró Se Ha Perdido! (written by Pat Cherr; Crowell, 1960), this little boy was simply one of the children Keats's eyes never overlooked. "His expressive face, his body attitudes, the very way he wore his clothes, totally captivated me. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book." Captivated visually by his character, Keats let this child, who might occupy only the fringes of society in most children's books of the day, be a star in his. "The Snowy Dayshowed me what I was supposed to be doing with my life," he said.

"I love haiku poetry," Keats once stated, and its influence is evident in the simplicity of his stories. In The Snowy Day, a young boy revels in the wonder of winter's first snowfall. It is an evocative, universal story that captures the purity and innocence of childhood. Peter was destined to go on to other adventures in other books with his friends and younger sister. If featuring a black protagonist was to prove provocative, Keats's urban environments and the evolution of one character throughout a series of stories was unusual as well.

The collage style that Keats used in The Snowy Day seemed to just "happen." Only planning to use a bit of patterned paper here and there, he found that one thing called for another. He incorporated swatches of paper from different countries, scraps of material collected by friends and children he knew and, unexpectedly, bits and pieces turned up when he needed them.

"Jack cared desperately about his artwork and about his vocation as a children's book author-illustrator," says Susan Hirschman, his longtime editor at Macmillan and Greenwillow Books. She knew that his work had been transformed with The Snowy Day: Keats had found his style. "He knew exactly how he would want the book to look, the layout, the type, nothing was too much trouble," she says of working with him. "There was nothing casual about his stories. From Peter onward, his characters were more exciting to him, they were more important to him, it seemed, than may have been the people he knew."

The day that proofs for The Snowy Day arrived, Keats invited Hautzig to come see them at the space he shared with the legendary Pushpin Studio artists. Hautzig says that seeing the first proofs of what would be the Caldecott Medal winner for 1963 was thrilling. But the day also stands out in Hautzig's mind because she came home to find her apartment had been burgled; caught up in Keats's excitement, she had hurried out without even locking her door.

"At the time that he won the Caldecott Medal he didn't know what it was and certainly had no idea how important it was," Manushkin says now of The Snowy Day. The success that the award represented must have been enormously satisfying. However, nothing seemed able to insulate him from the harsh criticism that reviewer Nancy Larrick leveled against The Snowy Day. Hirschman describes the impact as a "body blow" to Keats, who took to his bed.

Larrick had found the depiction of the characters in The Snowy Day to be racist stereotypes and insisted that Keats had no right to do a story about blacks. But "he wasn't making a statement about the character being black," Hautzig recalls. "To Jack, he was just a wonderful little boy, and the mama in the story was so comforting." Having the spirit of his work so completely misunderstood left Keats deeply depressed. Hirschman credits his longtime friend Augusta Baker with helping him snap out of it. Baker, a master storyteller, had been coordinator of children's services at New York Public Library when she met Keats, and his book A Letter to Amy (Harper, 1968) was dedicated to her. Still, Keats never forgot that review.

On May 6, 1983, Ezra Jack Keats died, having written and/or illustrated more than 85 picture books. His biggest fans, and the critics whose opinions most mattered to him, were the children who continually let him know how much they loved his books. Pictures from little readers decorated his studio walls. "I can now look up at my studio walls and see my friends—children of every color," he said. Once, when asked the inevitable question about the source of his ideas for books, Keats replied, "Well, as an editor of mine once said, 'I'm an ex-kid.'"

Apparently, the ex-kid never forgot the hardships of his childhood or the anti-Semitic prejudice he encountered or the societal inequities he witnessed and tried, through his art, to address. Under the direction of Martin Pope, professor emeritus at New York University and Keats's friend since the age of 12, and Pope's wife, Lilly, the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation began to take shape in 1983, funded by the artist's royalties. Based on the simple directive to support programs that are helpful to humanity, the foundation has helped to fund a variety of scholarships, lectures, and literacy programs. From storytelling at the foot of Peter's statue in Brooklyn to a bookmobile that once toured Palestinian neighborhoods in Israel, the foundation has continued to promote the values that Keats cherished.

Keats's friend Manushkin thinks that one activity of the foundation that would have been particularly dear to him was the Ezra Jack Keats Medal, given to children for their artwork. "He never forgot how much encouragement he had felt as a kid when he won an award for his art," she says. "He really wanted other children to feel that."

Keats put his money where his heart was. His art has an innocence and a sense of wonder and rhythm that captures all of the energy of his urban world but none of the cynicism. Maybe he did manage to hold onto his childhood. As successful as he became, he was still surprised by how much people loved his work.

"Once, at a convention, he was autographing books, with long lines stretched out waiting to meet him," Hirschman remembers. "And each person that came up would tell him how much his work meant to them, how they loved it. And every time, he would look up, genuinely pleased and surprised by their comments and say, 'Really?'" Then she added, "By God, he meant it every time."