Philip Nel - Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Childrens Literature

CROCKETT JOHNSON
and
RUTH KRAUSS

HOW AN UNLIKELY COUPLE

FOUND LOVE,

DODGED THE FBI,

AND TRANSFORMED

CHILDRENS LITERATURE

Philip Nel

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from
Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Childrens Literature Association Series

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association
of American University Presses.

frontis: Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson on their front porch, 1959.
Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced courtesy of
the New Haven Register.

Copyright 2012 by Philip Nel
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nel, Philip, 1969
Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss : how an unlikely couple found
love, dodged the FBI, and transformed childrens literature / Philip Nel.
p. cm. (Childrens literature association series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-624-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61703-636-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61703-625-5 (ebook) 1. Johnson, Crockett, 19061975.
2. Krauss, Ruth. 3. Childrens literature, AmericanHistory and criticism. I. Title.

PS3519.O224Z77 2012

813.52dc23

[B] 2012001106

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Karin,
who, for a dozen years, shared her spouse with this book

CROCKETT JOHNSON
and
RUTH KRAUSS

Few stories are completely perfect, said the lion.

Thats true, said Ellen, leaving the playroom. And otherwise its a wonderful story. Thank you for telling it to me.

CROCKETT JOHNSON, The Lions Own Story (1963)

When a stranger knocked on Crockett Johnsons front door one mild Friday in August 1950, he was not expecting was a visit from the FBI.

Stepping out onto his porch, Johnson spoke with one federal agent while another surreptitiously snapped his photograph. As he stood there politely answering their questions, he had no idea that the bureau had for months been opening his mail, monitoring his bank account, and noting the names of anyone who visited or phoned.

For the previous five years, Johnson and his wife, Ruth Krauss, had been living quietly in Rowayton, a small coastal community in Norwalk, Connecticut. They had been married for seven years. He was famous for writing Barnaby (194252), the epitome of the thinking persons comic strip. In a few years time, he would begin writing what would become his best-known book, Harold and the Purple Crayon. She was gathering material for her eleventh childrens book, A Hole Is to Dig (1952), the classic that launched the career of Maurice Sendak.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their modest acclaim, the FBI had begun keeping tabs on Johnson and Krauss in April 1950. By the time the investigation concluded five years later, the FBI had amassed a file so detailed that it mentioned an interview with the manager of the Baltimore apartment building where Krausss mother lived.

Situated at the intersection of art, politics, and commerce, the lives of Krauss and Johnson lead us into a lost chapter in the histories of childrens books, comics, and the American Left. During the McCarthyist 1950s, left-wing artists and writers, shut out of many fields, found success in childrens literature. Only two childrens authors were called to testify before the House

It was a good time to be writing for younger readers: Thanks in part to the baby boom, the American childrens book business was thriving. Between 1950 and 1960, total annual sales nearly tripled, reaching a record high of eighty-eight million dollars in 1960. The decade of Harold and the Purple Crayon and A Hole Is to Dig was also the decade of C. S. Lewiss The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Astrid Lindgrens Pippi Longstocking (English translation, 1950), E. B. Whites Charlottes Web (1952), Kay Thompsons Eloise (1955), Syd Hoffs Danny and the Dinosaur (1958), and several Dr. Seuss standards: Horton Hears a Who! (1954), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), and The Cat in the Hat (1957). In the 1950s, Leo Lionni, Richard Scarry, Maurice Sendak, and Crockett Johnson debuted as childrens authors. The decade launched careers and classics.

Two of the decades best childrens book creators were also best friends. Theirs was a love story of complementary opposites. Nearly six feet tall and with the build of an ex-football player, Crockett Johnson was a gentle giant, a soft-spoken man with a wry sense of humor. A slender five feet, four inches tall, Ruth Krauss was outspoken and exuberant, an original thinker who nonetheless harbored doubts about her creative gifts. Where Krauss could be anxious, Johnson was always calm. Their backgrounds differed, too. She was a secular Jew from a bourgeois Baltimore family; the son of two immigrants, he was a lapsed Methodist who grew up in working-class Queens. As Krauss wrote in A Moon or a Button (1959), she and Johnson were two people on a long winding road and they meet in the middle.

Between them, they created more than seventy-five books, many of which became classics. Five of Johnsons seven books about Harold and his purple

Harold and the Purple Crayon has captivated so many people because Harolds crayon not only embodies the imagination but shows that the mind can change the world: What we dream can become real, nothing can become something. The books succinct expression of creative possibility tells readers that although they may be subject to forces beyond their control, they can improvise, invent, draw a new path. Many earlier works explored the boundaries between real and imagined worldsChuck Joness Duck Amuck (1953), Saul Steinbergs New Yorker cartoons of the early 1950s, Ren Magrittes The Human Condition 1 (1933), and Winsor McCays Little Nemo in Slumberland (2 May 1909), among others. But Johnson distilled this idea into its simplest and most profound form. His Harold lives in the existential uncertainty of the blank canvas: There is no world except that which he makes. A small god in a white romper, Harold uses art to create the heavens and the earth, dragons and apple trees, tall buildings and nine kinds of pie. Explaining why Harold and the Purple Crayon is the childrens art book she recommends above all others, Jackson Pollock biographer Deborah Solomon writes that it suggests that one well-worn, stubby crayon could allow you to dream up a whole universe. Which of course it can. Theres no better art history lesson than that.

Where Johnsons feeling for a childs creativity emerged in his artist hero, Ruth Krauss conveyed her respect by bringing real childrens voices into her work and in so doing changed the way authors write for young people. In her Here and Now Storybook (1921), Lucy Sprague Mitchell reproduced child-authored tales in the childs own words. In