My Arnold Lobel Study

Learn from the greats
Written By Rachel Michelle Wilson

This is where I keep everything I’ve learned about children’s book author-illustrator Arnold Lobel.

Below you’ll find information about him and his work in a Q&A format for easy perusing, a list of his books, and all the resources I’ve found so far.

Note: Please forgive the mistakes and typos as this is a side project I do for fun :)

His life

What was his childhood like?

Arnold Stark Lobel was born on May 22, 1933, in Los Angeles. When his parents got divorced, he was taken care of by his grandparents who were German-Jewish immigrants living in Schenectady, New York.

He described feeling unhappy as a child and seeking refuge in the library to live inside picture books “capable of suggesting everything that is good about feeling well and having positive thoughts about being alive.”

Throughout most of second grade, he was very sick and had to stay home, so he filled his time drawing animals. After returning to school, he was bullied, but he used his stories and drawings to connect with other kids.

What inspired him to make children’s books?

Lobel started telling stories around age seven or eight to other children, and they loved them. So did the teachers.

“If the teacher had 20 minutes she didn't know what to do with, she'd say: ‘Well, Arnold is going to tell a story.’ And everybody yelled and screamed, and I would get up and I would tell stories. They had conversations—I don't remember any of them—they had plots. When I started, I didn't know how they were going to end but they just came out of me. And I would draw pictures to go with them.

But when he became a teenager, Lobel started feeling ashamed of all that and “buried it” for a while.

Where did he go to school?

In 1955, he graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with a degree in illustration.

“When I was in art school that was the thing to go into, an advertising agency, Madison Avenue, the whole thing. That was the grey flannel suit era…Advertising agencies were very powerful. Well I guess they still are. But to work in it is not too pleasant. I suspect one pays, if one makes any money at all, in terms of physical demands and emotional demands.”

After graduating from art school, he ended up working in advertising agencies and hated it.

“This was in the mid 50's, at which time there really was not a children's book market, strangely enough. There was Dr. Seuss, Robert McCloskey, and, of course, Sendak had just begun. It was really a very small field, and 1 said, "Well, perhaps 1 would like to try that."

He went to employment agencies, but when he said what he wanted to do, they would respond, “Oh no, you can't do that. There's no money in it.” And because he knew he had a family to support, he continued working in advertising. This changed when he decided he “could not get on the subway every morning and face the workaday world,” so he put together a portfolio and set off to “pound the pavements,” because “unless your mother happens to be an editor at Harper and Row, there is simply no other way to do it.”

How did he get his start in the publishing industry?

Luckily for all of us, Lobel fell back into children’s books “by a succession of accidents and necessities.” He said he began writing for children because he “couldn’t do anything else.”

I had to eat, and it was one thing I thought I had a feeling for. If I had been successful in advertising, I'd be in an advertising agency now drawing brassieres, and I'd have an ulcer. So I do feel lucky that I didn't get into that.

He started in about 1960 with the small publishers who weren’t interested. Then as a last resort, he tried the prestigious Harper and Row where the great editor Ursula Nordstrom worked. They offered him an illustration gig which required 64 pages of swimming salmons.

“They wouldn't have dreamed of giving it to an artist who had any kind of reputation. But I did it and once I had my foot in the door and knew a few people, I was able to continue.”

Red Tag Comes Back (and all of Lobel’s salmon) was published in 1961. He noticed that he would get 5% royalties on illustrator-only projects and 10% if he wrote it himself, so he decided to write his own stories out of “economic expediency.”

His first book as an author-illustrator came out in 1962 called A Zoo for Mister Muster.

How did he build his career?

Lobel describes how he took every project he could because he needed the money. But it was really hard to work on projects he didn’t enjoy.

“I had some very painful months because I've learned through that that it is very bad to illustrate a manuscript that you do not really like and have faith in. It's a long process it can last as long as a year, and if you're working on a manuscript that you if you don't like it to begin with, you will hate it when you're finished.

To get up in the morning and crawl to the drawing table illustrating this awful thing that you can't stand anymore, it's really very painful. That is why you have to be so careful in picking manuscripts that some other people have written. Of course, your own manuscripts you have no excuse for. You've got to like them.”

Arnold Lobel’s friend and colleague James Marshall asserted that something happened after Anita Lobel’s Sven’s Bridge was published: “In the late sixties he started becoming Arnold Lobel. From that time on, he worked with a single-mindedness of purpose, polishing, refining, and respecting his art.”

In 1970, an editor encouraged him to try writing early readers which was a form going through a transition. About this time in children’s book history, Lobel said:

That was the same time that the Russians launched sputnik, and America suddenly got this terrible inferiority complex about our educational system. They said, “We must do something about the education of our children because we're not producing." I think that really directly led to this whole emphasis on children's books.

Lobel had already been illustrating a lot of early readers, because they’d been exploding after the Little Bear series (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) was such a huge success. So according to Lobel, between 1959-1962, “the children's book field suddenly accelerated.”

There was suddenly a need; they realized that they had something great going. And there were a lot of manuscripts and not too many illustrators. And so, being young and enthusiastic, I was given a lot of "I Can Read" manuscripts to illustrate. It wasn't until quite some time later that I started writing. I wrote a few that weren't all that successful before Frog and Toad.

In the 1950s, early readers had begun to move away from the repetitive lines of Dick and Jane to the energetic rhythms of Dr. Suess. Even so, early readers typically followed the rules of The Dolch List — a list of acceptable words for early readers. Arnold Lobel wanted to do something different.

Him and his editors at Harper Row decided to focus less on a word list and more on prioritizing great stories using short sentences, effective repetition, and short chapters.

I don't use a controlled vocabulary at all. I wouldn't dream of it. There are some publishers, I've heard, that impose that on their authors. I don't know how it works. When I'm writing, I know I'm writing an early reader and I think about it all the time. I think of trying to express myself in the simplest fashion I can, but I won't stop and not use a word that is a little longer, if there's not a simpler word.

I've used words like "avalanche," "beautiful," because there just isn't another word that I could gracefully exchange them for. And a word like "avalanche" is a great word for a child to have. Once he learns it within the context of a story that he loves, why he'll always have it, I think.

And thus began the award-winning Frog and Toad series based on Lobel’s childhood memories of adopting frogs and toads as pets in Vermont.

Over the course of his 26 year career, he published over 100 books for children and received many award including a Caldecott Honor for Hildilid’s Night by Cheli Duran Ryan, a Caldecott Honor for Frog and Toad are Friends, a Caldecott Medal for Fables that he wrote and illustrated, and a Newbery Honor for Frog and Toad Together.

What was his personal life like?

While at art school in 1955, Lobel married his classmate Anita Kempler and they moved across the street from the Prospect Park Zoo. They had two kids Adrianne (a set designer) and Adam (a musician).

Lobel was friends with many other creators in the industry. James Marshall wrote a touching obituary about him that is filled with so much goodness about Lobel and his work. Like how Arnold was a great friend who “practiced what he preached — or rather didn’t preach.” And how when one of his friend’s books came out, he “wouldn’t wait to be presented with a copy; he would rush out and buy the book — and read it,” which meant a lot to Marshall.

Marshall also told the story of their only “falling-out” when Marshall “implied, not too subtly, that perhaps [Lobel’s] beloved cat, Orson, was a bit on the dim side.” Years later, after Orson died, Marshall was making a big show of playing with the new cat Alfred. Arnold leaned forward and said: “I . . . haven’t . . . forgotten . . . about Orson, you know.” Marshall concluded that “old Orson has the last laugh” since Lobel immortalized him in drawings and poems.

Arnold Lobel came out as gay to his family in 1970 and met his life-long partner Howard Weiner in 1970. Something fun about them is that Weiner was 5’ 4” and Lobel was over 6 ft tall. Later, Weiner co-owned a B&B and created a Frog and Toad room to honor Arnold Lobel. You can even stay there!

How did Lobel’s work impact the industry?

He is most remembered for his Frog and Toad series which won a Caldecott Honor and a Newbery Honor. They elevated the traditional early reader by offering interesting plots and well-rounded characters.

About Arnold Lobel, James Marshall said:

“I’ve heard him called a genius. I believe that he was, but I also believe that he made himself a genius, through a combination of instinct and hard work.”

His books often explore themes of individuality and relationships through the adventures of charming animal characters. His whimsical illustrations were mostly made with graphite, ink, and watercolor.

When did he pass away?

Lobel was actively working on books until he sadly had heart failure due to the complications of AIDS at age 54 in 1987.

In an obituary, Lobel’s friend James Marshall said:

There was always something appropriate about Arnold Lobel, appropriate in the very best sense. When he learned he had a fatal illness, he tried to convince himself and his friends that perhaps it was, after all, an appropriate time to die. But he soon gave up that notion. He realized that there was nothing at all appropriate about a man dying at the height of his creative powers. It was a horrible thing, and it was sad. He would not have called it a tragedy. We know it is.

But facing the fact that, as he put it, the jig was up, he conducted himself in an extraordinary way. When I asked him how he could be so brave, he became annoyed. He didn’t like that kind of talk. He said that bravery had nothing to do with it and that it wasn’t really so difficult to die. He said he’d decided to approach it as his new job, something that he had to do as well as he could.

How typical of Arnold. This, in fact, was very much the way he approached his art…

…Arnold asked me to thank Howard Wiener who took such good care of him at the end. And he asked me to say this. “Tell them,” he said, “that if they wish to do something nice for me, ask them to look at the books. Because that’s where they’ll find me.”

His creative process

How did he come up with his ideas?

When asked that question, Lobel replied:

Oh, heaven knows. Well, how does an adult author come upon an idea for a story? It's lifetime experience. It's just that I transmogrify everything to children because that's my particular medium.

You know, if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children. The children don't know, but the truth of the story, whatever gives it validity, is its truth to me, as an adult.

He also said, “You take it out of the child in yourself.”

But he didn’t think you had to have “a special rapport with children on a social level.” Like Hans Christian Andersen for example whose statue always has “children climbing all over it, “ but Lobel called him a “fussy, prissy, old maid of a bachelor [who wouldn’t] have children anywhere within 10 miles of him.”

How could he tell when he had a good story?

First he believed in always keeping his eyes and mind open when working, “particularly in the beginning of a book for any kind of inspiration.”

Lobel said, “I can tell when I'm working that the thing is good—I usually can tell, this is good, this is bad. . . on my own level. I really don't know whether it's good or bad for the world. Sometimes I'll do a book that I'll think is terrific. Then it'll come out and nothing will happen to it. There's no way of telling. It's all very unpredictable.”

For example, he was so proud of his book The Man Who Took the Indoors Out, but it didn’t do as well as he thought it would.

He often wrote lots of stories, like for the Mouse books, and threw away a lot to whittle down to the best ones.

I do seem to be able to know when something is working dramatically. I began with the abstract idea of a very tall something and a very short individual and kind of thought about all of it; I guess that's the way any artist would work…thinking about all the emotional ramifications of this relationship.

After a book came out, he said the way to really know if a book was successful was from the letters and drawings by children.

How did he feel about his own writing?

He described writing as “very painful,” and the “spinach” before the “dessert.”

I have to force myself not to think in visual terms, because I know if I start to think of pictures, I'll cop out on the text.

Lobel often expressed that he felt insecure about his own writing:

I feel that I'm a trained illustrator and a lucky amateur in terms of writing.

Because of this, he would always write his stories completely before drawing pictures:

Drawing the pictures is nothing for me. I know how to draw pictures. With writing, I'm in quicksand a bit. I don't really know what I'm doing. It's very intuitive.

Sometimes people would ask him how he wrote his stories, and he didn’t knwo what to say except, “I don’t know.”

And I think that was a very truthful answer. I'm a sort of amateur writer and I write in a very intuitive way. And I can't be very articulate as to how those stories are evolved. They are based on adult preoccupations.

What was his process for making books?

He would finish the writing, then sketch out the dummy before bringing it to the publisher. Then they’d give him feedback and he’d make changes and take it home to work on the original artwork and color overlays.

He sketched using tracing paper.

I just keep putting pieces of tracing paper over them again and again. My entire career rests on the invention of tracing paper. Without it, I couldn't possibly work again.

The nice thing about tracing paper is you can take away on the next drawing what you don't like about the drawing you did before and you can retain the things that you do like and you just keep working and working until you like everything.

About how he made the dummies:

Everybody tells me nobody makes us finish dummies as I do. I think it's partly insecurity. I feel I want to do it right away and get it over with and it's half the work and it's kind of laziness really. I think everybody thinks I'm crazy when they see my sketches because apparently many artists don't work this carefully.

He took the dummies to such a finished place because he wanted to 1) show his editor what “those particular drawings will look like with that particular manuscript” and 2) see how the text and art will work together as he revised a lot himself before showing his editor.

I can't really see how that book is working dramatically without both the words and the pictures.

And on the secret to being as awesome as Arnold Lobel, James Marshall said:

No one worked harder than Arnold. He worked like a dog. But paradoxically — because Arnold was such a master — one never sees the wheels turning. His books are full of light and air.

There are some artists whose pages groan with self-importance — not Arnold. He accomplished what he did, I believe, by adhering to a simple but profound principle: he always, always remained true to himself. He knew what was right for him, and he never strayed. And he always avoided formula. Unlike some artists who have produced the same book for the past thirty years, Arnold created books that are always fresh and new and are never repeat performances.

His daughter Adrienne Lobel described that she learned discipline and faith as a creator from him: “You got up every day and you faced that drawing table whether you had an idea or not and just kept at it the same hours every day until you did have an idea and generally it was a good one.”

Did he see children’s books as more entertainment or education?

When asked this question during an interview, this is what he said:

I consider myself an entertainer primarily, although I'm fully aware that everything educates a child. I feel myself just the opposite of a teacher. A teacher in a classroom is there to educate. She can be amusing, but her primary purpose is to educate, and she's going to be amusing just to keep the attention of the class. My purpose is to entertain and peripherally I can also educate, so that puts me just the opposite.

I think it's very bad if a creator of children's book starts getting terribly pedagogical.

I'm also not comfortable unless I think I'm being funny. My way of reacting to children is through humor.

How did he approach humor in his books?

Just like he thought child and adult readers are pretty similar, he also thought child and adult senses of humor are similar:

It seems to me the one thing that doesn't change much as we grow older is our sense of humor…if you don't have a sense of humor when you're a child, you're not going to have one when you're an adult.

The same situations strike us funny when we're older, except we laugh at different things—we can laugh at sexual things; our points of reference become larger. But the basics: we laugh at incongruity and we laugh at lack of dignity. If a man's pants fall down, everybody laughs, children, adults.

He threw away a lot of ideas after realizing they were “not amusing enough” to sustain his interest for the 1-2 years he was working on them. He said he needed “a germ of humor that is appealing as an adult” or they would “become too stale for me to work on.”

How did he craft such satisfying endings?

Lobel started his stories before he knew their endings:

Very often I'll begin a story and have no idea what the ending is going to be and that's why I throw away a lot. If I can't resolve it, if I can't bring it to some fruition, I'll just throw it out or put it away.

Why did he use animals as characters in his books?

Lobel received a lot of manuscripts about “white suburban children” with “loving mommy and loving daddy and loving grandpa and all of that and isn't it wonderful” or about “black children, poor children, living in the ghetto.” To the first option, he said: “If they don't love mommy and daddy, they're not going to learn to do it because somebody tells them to do it.” And to the second, “How can I give any credence to this story” without having lived it?

He felt more comfortable using animals because “by pulling it away from everybody, everything, you bring it to everybody. I mean, Frog and Toad belong to no one but they belong to everyone, every sector: rich children, poor children, white children, black children. Everybody can relate to Frog and Toad because they don't exist in this world.”

One of his rules was to not “make any direct allusions to modern life.” Frog and Toad don’t call each other on the phone or drive cars or anything. And he called himself a “fairly conservative writer” so he didn’t have to deal with censorship as much as Frog and Toad “live in a world where these things don’t exist.”

He also liked that animal characters could maintain “the freedom of adults” with “the attitudes of children.” As children often feel restricted and “surrounded by boundaries” — like “a prison really” — he wanted them to read stories about characters who don’t have parents and have the freedom of adults, but who are still children and have the preoccupations of children like cookies, ice cream, swimming.

He liked drawing animals more than people and felt he drew them better than people: “It's awfully hard to draw mommy and daddy in the kitchen and not make it look like a commercial for Westinghouse refrigerators.”

How did he create such iconic characters that feel alive beyond the page?

Lobel wanted to create characters that “are so clearly defined that they seem to be alive even when the child is not reading the book. They seem to have a life outside of that book, so that when the child gets back to the book, he refreshes his memory, he reunites himself with it. But when he closes the book, they're still there….They exist outside of the framework of the books that they're in because they're very clear. That's the secret I guess.”

How did he describe his characters?

I love his descriptions of Toad and Owl:

Toad is a neurotic and Owl is a psychotic.

Toad is like most of us. He knows the limits. He never goes over the line. There's always a certain logic to everything he does. He's irritated because he's looking for something that he hasn't found. He's the kind of a person who, if something goes wrong, goes to bed. We all do that occasionally. That's a very rational way of dealing with one's problems. You go to bed and. you wake up.

But Owl is a complete psychotic. His grasp of reality is gone. In one chapter he tries very desperately to be in two places at once, and doesn't make it. You know, that kind of thing. There's no sense of gravity to his thinking. It kind of completes the whole thing.

Did he see himself more as Frog or Toad?

He said, “Both, both. I think everybody is both.”

Did he know Frog and Toad would become what it did?

Nope. He said, “When I wrote the first Frog and Toad, I had done quite a number of books and I didn't think that was anything special. Obviously it had more impact than anything I'd ever done and I hadn't really expected that. So, you know, I really don't quite know what I'm doing.”

How did he feel about making sequels and series?

He was wary of making more Frog and Toad books after the first two, because he didn’t want his books to become a product.

There's a tendency for an artist or creator to start turning out a product. This particularly happens to American artists. They get a little successful, so they start grinding these things out and I wouldn't want to do a Frog and Toad book that wasn't as good as the first two because that would cast a bad light on the first two. I don't want to compromise the two, and I really don't want to make a kind of a product out of it.

Did Lobel ever want to write longer novels?

When people told him he should write longer novels, he would always say, “Well no, I'm a picture book person." He thought he might consider it “when the eyesight fails and old age comes in,” but overall he didn’t think he could do it.

I don't have a very literate background. I went to art school. I have a degree because they did sandwich in a few English courses—a few courses in Social Studies, they called them—just enough; but really my education is not particularly good. I don't know if I could have a grasp of literature necessary to turn out a novel. I don't really know the structure of a novel.

Did he enjoy writing in verse?

He saw writing in verse like a game — like “doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.” He didn’t think he was very good at it, but still wanted to do more because he thought it was fun.

How did he develop his unique voice and style?

When Lobel would talk about his voice as an artist, he would talk about who he was as a person. His life experiences and sensibilities. He described himself as a “very domestic kind of person” and felt that came through in his work.

It's all very bourgeois. There's a lot of furniture, a lot of accoutrements of the home, because that's what I am. I'm really not much of a traveller or wanderer or adventurer and I think that feeling certainly comes into my books. I notice that all of my books are rather homebound.

Though he loved home, he also called himself “a small adventurer.” He also described his reserved nature:

I'm not a particularly demonstrative person. I grew up in a very stoic household. I was raised by my grandparents who were German Jews. When 1 was little, there was laughter in the house but I don't remember any discord, any crying. It was all very very stoic and I'm not the kind of person who embraces people easily. I'm rather reserved. That I think comes across, a certain reticence in my work. I see it. It isn't as obvious to others as it is to me.

How did he approach color palettes in his work?

Lobel often was limited to three colors for the I Can Read series, but he preferred limited color palettes anyway:

I frankly like the limitation. I tend to like the books with fewer colors better than the full color books generally by me and by other artists.

On Lobel’s color palette, James Marshall said:

Arnold had one of the most exuberant and original palettes in books. Certainly he looked long and hard at the great English watercolorists. But being his own person, he extended and developed. He is, without doubt, one of the very finest watercolorists who ever lived.

There is a particular green. If God created one truly hideous color, it is this green, somewhere between bile and phlegm. Most artists wouldn’t touch it. But Arnold used this green all the time - and he made it beautiful, amusing, interesting. He made it work.

Lobel described how experience is essential to improving your use of color:

Those things you just learn through doing. I've been doing it since 1960 so I've learned a few things about how to make a book look good. It just happens naturally that you do.

Like for the “I Can Read” books, he learned that bright colors were “too strong for those little books” with their big type.

In my early years I used to do bright colors in those things and I really wasn't happy with them, so I gradually got muter and muter and became more pleased with the aesthetic result.

How did he develop the comforting tone of his work?

He liked making stories with that had a “gentleness” and “simplicity” to them.

Being a parent definitely impacted his work.

I think if you have children…you kind of adapt that for them. You create a feeling of well-being, whether or not you feel it. After awhile it becomes second nature.

No matter how horrible, no matter how nightmarish you feel the world is, you kind of hide that for them and, after awhile, it becomes a part of you.

He saw nostalgia and domesticity as an essential part of children’s books as all children (and adults) want to feel a sense of safety.

The domesticity is a kind of going back to a time when one was dependent on the security that one's parents could provide. I think we are all nostalgic for that, and our sense of creating homes for ourselves and our children is part of the nostalgia.

I don't know what people do who had unpleasant childhoods. I myself had a rather physically pleasant and emotionally unpleasant childhood. My surroundings were rather convivial to happiness. I wasn't so happy for other reasons, but I lived in a nice house with nice furniture, a nice backyard with trees and everything. I think that probably comes into my work.

How did he deal with creative blocks or burn out?

When describing his creative blocks, he compared being a writer to being a magician:

All writers have this period when they feel like magicians pulling rabbits out of a hat. All of a sudden you look in the hat and there are no more rabbits. And I've sort of had that lately.

To manage those moments, he said:

I really don't have any basic method of getting into it. I just have to sit down and throw away a lot of stuff and hope that eventually it will begin to flow and I'll begin to do something that pleases me.

How did he handle feedback?

When his editor told him his story about a rabbit wasn’t very good, he “sort of blustered.” But even so, he wouldn’t storm out because he usually trusted “an objective opinion.” He knew that “after working on something a long time” it is hard “to have an objective opinion,” because he was blind to certain things. So after receiving feedback, he’d take the story home and “put it away for awhile” until he was ready to reread it. And when he did, he thought, “My God, she's right, this is not very good.”

He said if a book was in trouble, he would “stick it in the closet for about six months and I take it out again and then I can see I see it very freshly.”

Sometimes he would share his stories with friends. Other times he wouldn’t.

I have my wife and children and I read it aloud to people. They offer suggestions which I will accept or not. You have to use your judgment.

He also described the danger of having such a good reputation in the industry that “a publisher will publish anything you do because they'll think…they don't want to lose you. Maybe this new book is lousy, and they know it's lousy but who knows, maybe his next book will be terrific and we don't want him to go someplace else with that book so we'll publish the bad book.”

But he preferred editors who could be forthright with him. Though he was willing to argue when he disagreed.

He encouraged his editors, if they weren’t sure about a story, to share it with everybody:

Get as many opinions as possible. Show it to the elevator man, show it to the cleaning lady, I want as many opinions as I can get. Then we'll sort it out. Then I'll think about it.

How long did it take him to make his books?

He wrote some books in a week and some in six months. A few of the Mouse Tales only took five minutes (like the one about the mouse who travels to his mother).

Books do come easily to me when I'm working on them. But I let them sit in my brain for years before I work on them. I truly believe the theory that they're working in my subconscious.

I'm rather like Mother Hubbard about books. If the cupboard is bare, I can work well. For instance, right now I have two books of my own authorship that I'm going to be doing. I'm willing to bet that I won't have any ideas for books until I'm finished with both.

Sometimes he’d take it to his editor who would say, “Are you sure you can't do better?” And then he’d go home and “struggle with it.”

How would he describe what makes picture books a unique form?

About the picture book, Lobel said:

If you were writing a novel, you would work on structure and you'd work out your characters and you'd be on rather firm ground, because you would sort of know where you were going and what you wanted to do and what was going to happen.

But a picture book's more like poetry. It's much more elusive.

A picture book is an audio-visual thing. It's both, and in a good picture book you shouldn't know where the words stop and the pictures begin.

Certainly a child doesn't, particularly a small child who's being read to. He looks at the picture and hears the words from the parent's mouth, or somebody reading, and I don't think he dissociates the two. It comes to him as we'd watch a movie. We see an image and we hear a voice. It's one thing. And that makes it a whole different cup of tea.

What were some of his influences?

He was influenced by Dr. Suess:

I was about 8 or 9 in 1939 when his first books came out and I loved them. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, I was just the right age when that hit the market. It probably was one of the decisive books of my life.

He was an Edward Lear fan. And also loved Tomi Ungerer, Maurice Sendak, and James Marshall.

About Marshall he said: “He's very good. George and Martha, the two hippopotamuses, are his most famous things. He's a friend of mine. You tend to like your friends' work. You meet people in the field, and if you like them, you like their work. If you don't like them, you don't like their work. It's very strange. And sometimes a terrible thing is, you meet an artist whose work you hate but you like him and you don't know what to do.”

He liked The Wind in the Willows, but saw it an adult book that “adults read because it makes them nostalgic for what they felt as child.”

Which of his own books was his favorite?

He always answered, “My next book.”

I don't really think I have any top favorite. I guess Frog and Toad I feel very close to, and Owl At Home too.”

But for a while after finishing a book, he usually didn’t like it:

"For a while after finishing a book you don't like it and then, when it gets old enough, you start liking it again. It acquires the charm of antiquity.

For instance, one of the slides there was a super Mr muster which was done in 1961. And in 1962 and 63 and 64, I couldn't look at it because it seemed just terrible to me. But now that it's 10 years later I look back on that and it has a certain charm that I find sort of appealing. If I just live long enough, I'll get to enjoy all of my books again.

In addition to that emotional rollercoaster, he described another one once he saw his books on the shelves:

“There's a certain sense of letdown. You work on a book for sometimes as long as two years and then it comes out and it's just another book. There it is, put in on the shelf with the others. And there's a certain not exactly disappointment with it. Although sometimes if you get a few bad reviews, you are disappointed.

What did he think of awards and the opinion of peers?

When describing Dr. Suess’s career, Lobel said “he became like Walt Disney,” churning stuff out so fast that “the quality went down.” He knew the children wouldn’t care, but his peers would.

It's all very complicated because you know when you're writing books for children, you're also writing books for your peer group.

And he went on to describe the Children’s Book Showcase and how “you want your books to be in them.”

If you don't get into these shows, you begin to feel rather bad. If several years pass by and you don't make these shows, you think there's something wrong with your work. It has nothing to do with children.

Children don't know from beautiful art styles. They want a book that's going to be pleasing for them on another level. Not that it would hurt them to see a beautiful book, of course, illustrated with exquisite taste and beautiful type. There was a theory that if a child sees a book like that, if you put a beautiful book in the hands of a small child, it will develop their tastes…I don't know if that's true. But as an artist, I want my books to be beautiful and wonderful on that level.

Lobel continues to describe how when he makes books, he is thinking about all of this at once. “You have to please the kids, you have to please the librarians, you have to please the art directors.” And that sometimes you can take it too far by making them “too designed, too sophisticated.” Or sometimes “too screwy and cartoony. Those are the kinds of things that go wrong. And they go wrong with me frequently.”

After he won the Newbery, he described getting in his head about being a capital W writer:

I consider myself an illustrator who also writes and now that I've got this honor I'm suddenly a writer with a capital W. My editor is saying, “Well now you've got to write a novel.”

I hope it doesn't make me self-conscious because up until now I felt very free about my writing because I've only used my writing as a kind of support for my pictures now that's all turned around in my mind I'm sort of in a state of confusion about it.

What did he feel was the difference between children and adult readers?

Lobel felt that adult and child readers aren’t really that different emotionally:

I think a child probably goes through all the same kind of struggles. I don't think we lose anything when we grow up. We think that we're adults and that our emotions are adult, but we're really just going through the same kind of thing that we went through as children. Maybe we were more open about revealing our feelings when we were children.

But he did say that children are a different kind of reader:

Children…they're amazing. Once they bite into reading, they'll read anything. Once they are enjoying it, nothing stops them, even if they come to a word that they have to sort of sound out and fight with a bit. They just kind of devour it very quickly.

How did he interact with kids outside of his books?

About writing for children, he said:

I don't think there's another art form where the creator is more separated from his audience than in children's books. There is really no way that a creator of children's books can get an opinion from his four to six year old audience. They are simply not going to communicate with him directly as an adult can come up to an adult novelist and sit down and talk with him about it.

Or you know you can go and be a composer and have your piece of music played in a concert hall and everybody will applaud and you know it's been appreciated. But the only way you can tell how your books are coming across is by the letters and the pictures and the drawings that students that children do.

He received so many letters from kids that he called it “a big problem.” He only collected them three times a year. Then he hired someone who would type as he dictated, and they’d finish them all in a few days. He would also add drawings. Thought he hated doing it because it was “a terrible bore,” he tried to answer all of the letters, including drawings and valentines.

He wasn’t a fan of fill-in-the-blank letters written for classroom assignments—he called them brainwashed letters—but he answered them anyway because he knew the kid had selected his book and that they had loved it. A few ridiculous letters he received included:

a mimeographed letters saying "Dear Blank" (typewritten). "I like your book very much. It was good" and then a blank for the book where the child is to fill in the title and then a blank for the name

Once I got a letter where the teacher had written the letter form on the blackboard. She had written "address, body, name," so I got this letter, "Dear Mr. Lobel, I like your book very much, blah blah blah, Love, Name."

Lobel loved it when he’d travel across the country and a kid would say, “Got your letter.” But he’d get super nervous going to classrooms and talking to children, so most of the time he’d say no.

I'll talk to librarians…on an adult level, but generally not children because I have never taught. I don't have that kind of experience of getting in front of a group of children. Sendak, I don't think, has ever been within two feet of a child. He doesn't have any children in his life.

He compared a teacher having great rapport with kids while not being great at making children’s books to a great children’s book maker who didn’t have great rapport with kids. He said you don’t necessarily need both sets of skills to be successful at what you do.

What did he think makes a good book for children?

Lobel’s answer to this question changed over the course of his career:

When I first started writing, I would begin by writing stories for children that were really outside my own feelings. I would ask myself, “What would the children like?” I was writing fairly charming little books, but they really didn't have any kind of weight to them. And then I suddenly realized that if I was going to be a writer, I was going to be a writer like any writer, and it was going to come from myself.

He also talked about why he thought Frog and Toad was successful:

All of the Frog and Toad stories are based on adult preoccupations really. 1 was able to tilt them somehow so that a child could appreciate them too, but I think that adults also enjoy them—and I think that's probably why. It's because they're really adult stories, slightly disguised as children's stories.

Though Lobel is now thought of as highly original, he didn’t strive for that in his stories:

I don't think I work for originality when I write. I think it's kind of dangerous to do that because if I started to be terribly original, I would end up with crazy things that I would have no contact with.”

He believed the secret to creating great books for children is in “writing for oneself about oneself” (CJM).

His books

1958

Published first illustrations with Ktav: Bible Time, Hebrew Dictionary, Holiday Dictionary, a set of three activity books by Sol Scharfstein

1961

Red Tag Comes Back written by Fred Phleger

  • First illustrated picture book with Harper and Row

  • An I Can Read Book

Something Old Something New written by Susan Rhinehart

1962

Little Runner of the Longhouse written by Betty Baker

A Zoo for Mister Muster

  • First book as an author and illustrator

  • Pen and ink

Let's Be Indians written by Peggy Parish

1963

A Holiday for Mister Muster

Greg's Microscope written by Millicent E. Selsam

Terry and the Caterpillars written by Millicent E. Selsam

Prince Bertram the Bad

The Secret Three written by Mildred Myrick

The Quarreling Book written by Charlotte Zolotow

1964

Giant John

  • pen and ink

Miss Suzy written by Miriam Young

Red Fox and His Canoe written by Nathaniel Benchley

Lucille

1965

Someday written by Charlotte Zolotow

The Bears of the Air

Dudley Pippin written by Phil Ressner

The Magic Spectacles and Other Easy-to-Read Stories written by Lilian Moore

Let's Get Turtles written by Millicent E. Selsam

1966

Oscar Otter written by Nathaniel Benchley

Benny's Animals and How He Put Them in Order written by Millicent E. Selsam

The Witch on the Corner written by Felice Holman

Martha the Movie Mouse

1967

Let's Be Early Settlers with Daniel Boone written by Peggy Parish

The Strange Disappearance of Arthur Cluck written by Nathaniel Benchley

1968

The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog

  • This was one of James Marshall’s favorite Lobel books.

The Great Blueness and Other Predicaments

  • Full color paintings

The Star Thief written by Andrea DiNoto

Ants Are Fun written by Mildred Myrick

The Four Little Children Who Went Around the World written by Edward Lear

1969

Sam the Minuteman written by Nathaniel Benchley

Junk Day on Juniper Street and Other Easy-to-Read Stories written by Lilian Moore

Small Pig

  • Black line drawing with color separation

I'll Fix Anthony written by Judith Viorst

1970

Frog and Toad Are Friends

  • “It was during a trip to Vermont in the middle 60s when we rented a house there were frogs and toads everywhere and my own children would bring them in the house and I grew to love them. They're marvelous creatures. Frogs make very bad pets because they won't eat in captivity. They just sit there looking very happy at the bottom of whatever you put them in, but toads make marvelous pets. You can take them home, and they'll eat anything, and they'll sit there. They hibernate. You can just keep them for years and years in an aquarium.”

The New Vestments written by Edward Lear

The Terrible Tiger written by Jack Prelutsky

1971

Ice-Cream Cone Coot, and Other Rare Birds

On the Day Peter Stuyvesant Sailed Into Town

Hansel and Gretel written by The Brothers Grimm

The Master of Miracle: A New Novel of the Golem written by Sulamith Ish-Kishor

1972

Miss Suzy's Easter Surprise written by Miriam Young

Seahorse written by Robert A. Morris

Tot Botot and His Little Flute written by Laura Cathon

Mouse Tales

Frog and Toad Together

THE DREAM: “That particular story was based on a very particular relationship I have with a friend who tends to be an expert in one-upmanship. And just observing that, feeling that tension that one does feel with someone you like very much but who you are constantly in…we all have people that we love but who constantly play that one-up game. If you know something, they know more. If you really like the person, you submit to that. You don't fight it; Frog submitted to it. He just got smaller and smaller.”

COOKIES: “All the Frog and Toad stories are based on specific things in my life. I don't think I've ever written one that was arbitrary. You know, silly things, like the story about the cookies. Well, there was a cookie that I had a lot of trouble with—not eating it, that is. So you begin with something like that. Here's this cookie that if you eat you're going to get heartburn and gain a lot of weight and get pimples, and you've got to stop eating it. And, of course, when you take a simple situation like that, trying to check a compulsion really, you touch on the whole range of things. Somebody put that chapter in a Weight Watchers' publication. I guess it lends itself very perfectly to a whole aspect of fighting with oneself and that can be for any kind of habit, gratification that one feels is bad for one. We all go through that, and children go through it too. They feel a little less compelled to do anything about it than we do, but they have it.”

A LIST: “I'm a compulsive list writer. I've had the experience of writing long lists and losing them and then having no mind because it was all there on the list. I learned at some point to take things out of myself and turn them into stories rather than just pull things out of the air, as it were.”

1973

As I Was Crossing Boston Common written by Norma Farber

Good Ethan written by Paula Fox

1974

The Clay Pot Boy written by Cynthia Jameson

Miss Suzy's Birthday written by Miriam Young

Circus written by Jack Prelutsky

The Man Who Took the Indoors Out

Dinosaur Time written by Peggy Parish

1975

Owl at Home

  • “I think one of the most personal books I've ever written was Owl At Home.”

1976

Frog and Toad All Year

In the third Frog and Toad book I get to a sentence—it's a Christmas story— "Toad decorated the tree." Well, decorate is not an "I Can Read" word but I thought "trimmed the tree," "put balls on the tree . ..." So I went back to "decorate" because even though it was a longer word, it was the word that was most functional and simple. I think that if it fits well in the story and the children are going along and very interested in their reading, they're going to have that, they're going to read it, they're going to grab it.

Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep written by Jack Prelutsky

1977

How the Rooster Saved the Day, illustrated by Anita Lobel

Merry Merry Fibruary written by Doris Orgel

Mouse Soup

  • Garden State Children's Book Award winner

1978

Gregory Griggs and Other Nursery Rhyme People

The Mean Old Mean Hyena written by Jack Prelutsky

Right as Right Can Be written by Anne Rose

Grasshopper on the Road

1979

A Treeful of Pigs, illustrated by Anita Lobel

Tales of Oliver Pig written by Jean van Leeuwen

Days with Frog and Toad

1980

Fables

  • He found Aesop’s Fables too violent for kids, so he chose to make his own.

  • Caldecott Medal winner

The Tale of Meshka the Kvetch written by Carol Chapman

The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep written by Jack Prelutsky

1981

More Tales of Oliver Pig written by Jean van Leeuwen

Uncle Elephant

On Market Street, illustrated by Anita Lobel

1982

Ming Lo Moves the Mountain

1983

The Book of Pigericks: Pig Limericks

The Random House Book of Poetry for Children written by Jack Prelutsky

1984

The Rose in My Garden, illustrated by Anita Lobel

1985

Whiskers & Rhymes

A Three Hat Day written by Laura Geringer

1986

Bear Gets Dressed written by Harriet Ziefert

Bear's Busy Morning written by Harriet Ziefert

Bear Goes Shopping written by Harriet Ziefert

Bear All Year written by Harriet Ziefert

The Random House Book of Mother Goose

Hildilid's Night written by Cheli Duran Ryan

1987

Where's the Turtle? written by Harriet Ziefert

The Devil and Mother Crump written by Valerie School Carey

1988

Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems written by Jack Prelutsky

Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child's Book of Poems written by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

The Turnaround Wind

2009

Odd Owls & Stout Pigs: A Book of Nonsense, color by Adrianne Lobel

The Frogs and Toads All Sang, color by Adrianne Lobel

  • Originally he made these as tiny booklets for Christmas presents.

  • His daughter felt him guiding her hand as she emulated his style from his Frog and Toad pop-up book.

  • The first story dated 6-7 years before Frog and Toad came out.

Resources

By him

About him

What unconscious desires do we put into our art, and how do they manifest in our life?…Or is it the answer to a deeper question, about the ways that our longings come out of us before we’re ready to know them, and we can only recognize them after they’ve been exorcised? Whatever the truth is, Frog and Toad will forever be my standard for every kind of love.

Things I want to read but haven’t yet:

Rachel Michelle Wilson
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