The small-town America of his youth is reflected in ''Lentil'' (1941), about a boy who learns to play a harmonica, and in the tall tales of ''Homer Price'' (1943) and its sequel ''Centerburg Tales'' (1951).īoston, where Mr.
McCloskey's books seemed to spring from his life experiences and observations. ''Ducks start quacking at the break of day, very loudly and emphatically.'' Simont said, adding that the experience remained vivid in his memory. ''He wanted to study them perfectly before he could make a book about them, so he made drawings of them in every position,'' Mr. McCloskey bought before writing ''Make Way for Ducklings.'' ''All of his work has always been very exact,'' said Marc Simont, the illustrator who shared a studio with him and with live ducks that Mr. The second honored ''Time of Wonder'' (1957), a kind of prose poem with large watercolor paintings of life on his cherished islands of Maine, where he lived much of his adult life.
The first was for ''Make Way for Ducklings'' (1941), perhaps his most enduring work, in which baby ducks in line behind their mother waddle along busy Boston streets to take up residence in the city's Public Garden. McCloskey twice won a Caldecott Medal, the American Library Association's annual award of distinction for children's book illustration. ''I have to wait until it bubbles out.'' It had to be right, and it often was. McCloskey wrote and illustrated only eight books, all for Viking Children's Books, and illustrated 10 by other authors, including Ruth Sawyer, whose daughter, Margaret Durand, a children's librarian, he married in 1940.
He was 88.Ī small-town boy with a gift for keen observation, Mr. Robert McCloskey, the writer and illustrator whose classic children's books - among them ''Make Way for Ducklings'' and ''Blueberries for Sal'' - captivated generations of young readers and their parents, died yesterday on Deer Isle, Maine.
0 kommentar(er)
