Folklore:
by Barbara Bader
In 1955, Marcia Brown's Cinderella, "freely translated" from Perrault,
was the first fairy-tale picture book to win a Caldecott Medal, No
wonder: outside of the five-and-dime, old tales were a rarity in picture
books. Folklore of all sorts came dependably in collections.
pictorial, in the way of
the Big Golden Books
of old.
There was Grimms' Fairy
Tales, of course; there
were English, Russian,
and Japanese fairy tales
There were compilations of tales from many
lands. No collection
was without illustrations, but these were the
raisins in the cake.
In 2010, the Caldecott went to Jerry
Pinkney's wordless dramatization of
the Aesop fable "The Lion and the
Mouse"—public recognition, in a
way, of the ascendancy of pictures over
words. Nowadays folklore comes mostly
in picture books, and the few story
collections that do appear are heavily
But the changes of
the past half century are
more than skin deep.
Once, folklore was
the bedrock of children's literature. A child
progressed from nursery
rhymes and fables to
folktales and literary
fairy tales, then advanced to myths
and legends, and emerged ready for
anything—high fantasy or hometown
adventure. Library cataloging reflected
that pattern, and so did the H.W,
Wilson Children's Catalog, the bible of
children's book selection.
Barbara Bader, a longtime contributor to The Hort^ Book, has previously written about Verna
Aardema and John Blerhorst. She is also the author of/4esop& Company, recipient of the
1992 Aesop Prize of the American Folklore Association for the most outstanding book incorporating folklore published for children or young adults.
September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 19
Compiled from a host of library lists,
the Children's Catalog represented a
consensus of what children should be
familiar with—not unlike the corpus
of recognized Western classics in college literature courses. Tbe children's
canon was broader and looser, though.
It included American Indian legends,
animal fables from India, tall tales
from the American frontier, magical tales from Japan. And from 1932,
decades before Marcia Brown illustrated
Cinderella, all proper library collections
contained a picture-book version of
a Puerto Rican folktale, Pura Belpré's
Perez and Martina.
Everyone knew Cinderella. Everyone knew, or was supposed to know.
Brown's other 1950s folktale picture
books. Puss in Boots and Dick Whittington and His Cat. But outside of the
Puerto Rican community, who knew
Perez and Martina'*. Gertainly not the
mothers and grandmothers, cousins
and aunts, who bought fairy tales as
birthday presents.
Perez and Martina: imperishable?
Poor Perez the mouse falls into the boiling
kettle of Christmas pudding that his beloved
Martina the cockroach is making for him—but
the story oi Perez and Martina lives on as a
library story twice-told.
In the 1920s, Pura Belpré was working at the
New York Public Library and going to the NYPL
Library School when she came across books
of folklore in the children's room and saw no
sign of the stories she knew from
her native Puerto Rico. She was
in a position—the best possible
position—to remedy that lack. In
her storytelling class, Belpré wrote
"Perez and Martina"; she told it at
a storytelling symposium, and it
became a popular puppet play.
One way or another it must have
caught the attention of Anne Carroll Moore, the NYPL's magisterial
head of children's services. In 1932,
under the imprint of Frederick
Warne, a Moore intimate, Perez and
Martina became a book—the first
book of Puerto Rican folklore by
20 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010
the first Puerto Rican librarian, or indeed Latina
librarian, in the NYPL library system (or perhaps
in any mainland library system).
Perez and Martina: A Portorican Folk Taie has
comedy, romance, and tragedy—pictured
by the Mexican illustrator Carlos Sanchez in
bold, stagy scenes purportedly inspired by the
puppet play. Pretty cockroach Martina, face
powdered and elegantly dressed, waits on her
It's a Fair assumption, then, that
libraries and schools, not bookstores,
kept Perez and Martina alive For seven
transFormative decades—^until it was
only one oFa great many books oFFolk
literature From all parts oFthe world,
most oFthem picture books.
W I T H THE POSTWAR
baby boom,
schools and libraries boomed, too,
and thanks to unprecedented Federal Funds For book purchases, so did
children's book publishing. United
balcony in hopes that gallant little Perez will
call. Other suitors are turned away: their sounds
do not please her. Enter Perez, crooning an old
Spanish love song—presented in Spanish and
English—and his ensuing "Chui, Chui, Chui,
Chui" sounds "just like music" to Martina's ears.
Nuptials follow, and then Perez's sad mishap.
As for the faithful Martina: "she still sings, she
still plays and she still weeps for her little Perez
to come back to her!"
In 1996 Belpré's groundbreaking achievements were recognized by the establishment of
the Pura Belpré Award, given to a Latino/Latina
writer and illustrator for outstanding work
portraying the Latino cultural experience, an
appropriate spur to do as she did.
Belpré and her cherished Perez and Martina
are together again, too, in a new (2008) picture
book. The Storyteller's Candle, written by Lucia
González and illustrated by Lulu Delacre—a
heartwarming evocation of the old storytelling
days at the New York Public and what it might
have meant to newly arrived Puerto Rican children to hear a familiar story told in their own,
familiar language.
Nations euphoria, and the emergence
oF new nations in Asia and AFrica,
quickly expanded the American market
For Folklore from lands and cultures
beyond the European orbit. The classic
European collections were mostly made
by the collectors themselves—men oF
letters who at their best wrote simply
and concisely, with directness and wit,
"Once upon a time there was a gentleman who took For his second wiFe the
proudest and haughtiest woman that
was ever seen, " the Brown/Perrault
Cinderella begins.
But how was one to tap, and treat,
the vast corpus oF African Folklore—
material previously collected by Western anthropologists For study by other
specialists? In 1947, with The Cow-Tail
Switch and Other West African Stories,
Harold Gourlander and George Herzog
showed how. Gourlander, Folklorist and
writer-at-large, and Herzog, an articled
anthropologist, went to West AFrica
to gather stories and learned firsthand
what the stories represented in the lives
oF their AFrican listeners.
"AFrica is many things, " we're told
straightaway—a continent oFmany
climates, peoples, and cultures. Their
stories, however, are also ours: "when
[West AFricans] came to the New
World as slaves they brought their
stories along, and you may hear some
oF them today as Br'er Rabbit tales in
the United States or as Bouqui and
Anancy tales in the West Indies and
South America. " The endnotes precisely
identify the stories' sources and place
each in context. Reviewers were struck
September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 21
by the "originality and distinction" of
the material and by its potential for storytelling and reading aloud, a big plus
for teachers and librarians. Who could
resist telling "Talk," as I did as a young
librarian? "'It wasn't the cow who spoke
to you,' the dog said [to the man]. 'It
was the yam. The yam says leave him
alone.'" The Horn Book review also
took note of the illustrations—deft
black-and-white silhouetted drawings
throughout—and the scholarly care in
making the book. It was a runner-up
for the Newbery Medal, and Courlander was established.
In the 1950s, sometimes with a collaborator, he published five additional
books of folktales from Asian and
African cultures (including the black
South). The books attracted attention
for their handsome design, their imaginative illustration, their thoughtful and
expansive notes. The stories themselves
had color and verve, and many got on
library storytelling lists. By decade's
end, Courlander had put the emerging
lands of Africa and Asia on the folklore
map for kids and prompted other
writers, native and Western, to explore
further.
It was a departure. Along with the
picture-booking of traditional tales
initiated by Marcia Brown, it was a new
beginning.
In the 1940s, according to The Storyteller's Sourcehook, forty-eight books
of folklore for children were published,
virtually all of them collections. In the
1950s, the total jumped to eighty-five,
and a few were assorted picture books
of some note (illustrated by Barbara
Cooney, Hans Fischer, and Feodor
Rojankovsky, besides Brown). In the
1960s, a surge, an eruption: 348 folklore books in all, well over half of them
picture books. And with the addition of
myths and legends, which The Storyteller's Sourcebook does not index, the total
would be far higher.
Cultural expansion was not the only
explanation. At home, the burgeoning population of preschool children
came in for increased attention—first
in local nursery schools and neighborhood libraries, then in the federally
funded Head Start program. For groups
of squirmy three- and four-year-olds
sitting on the floor, picture books were
the obvious answer. And what better
material to begin on than the age-old
nursery tales?—funny, fail-proof stories
that practically read themselves.
Opportunity knocked for veteran
children's illustrator Paul Galdone, an
22 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010
agile, engaging storyteller who moved
easily from the adventures of Anatole
the mouse, in Eve Titus's imaginative
tales, to the doings of the Gingerbread
Boy, Henny Penny, the Three Little
Pigs, Three Little Kittens, etc., etc., that
occupied him for the next three decades
and continue to delight young children.
Outwardly, Blair Lent was Galdone's
antithesis—a painter and printmaker
who found an artistic outlet in distinctly unconventional children's
picture books. Each of Lent's books
drew upon a different foreign tradition,
in substance and style—from The Wave,
a Japanese story, through the Russian Baba Yaga, the Nigerian Why the
Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky, the
Chinese Tikki Tikki Tembo, the Tlingit
Angry Moon, to the Japanese story that
won a Caldecott for Lent, The Funny
Little Woman. All these, and a few
more—with texts by such skilled writers as Margaret Hodges, Arlene Mosel,
and William Sleator—appeared in a
period of eight years.
focused on the familiar, and Lent,
who went far afield, there was Margot
Zemach. A virtuoso draftsmanillustrator, Zemach could do low
comedy and high dudgeon, American
folksiness and Italian craftiness—as
in, variously, the ubiquitous English
Three Sillies, the Swedish Nail Soup, the
Russian Salt, the English Teeny Tiny
Woman, the Russian Speckled Hen, the
Ozark Mommy, Buy Me a China Doll,
the German Fisherman and His Wife,
and the Italian Too Much Nose: all published, along with folk-like others, in
the five-year span between 1963
and 1967.
Everything in multiples. But that
was the 1960s, when well-known tales
were illustrated time and again and
little-known tales were disinterred for
their combination of artistic and ethnic
potential—the practice ever since.
Folklore got a boost of another kind
from Virginia Haviland, who was the
children's reading advisor at the Boston
Public Library and (from 1963) the
first Children's Book Specialist at the
Library of Congress. Haviland had
THE SPECKLED HEN
IAN NUHSKRV RHYME / AI>AI'1 Ml BV IIAKV'Ü
Somewhere between Galdone, who
September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 23
©
noticed, like others, that children were
losing interest in fairy tales before they
were able to read them. Her remedy
was a total makeover. In the sixteen
books of the Favorite Fairy Tales series,
Haviland offered simple, fluent adaptations of fairy tales from around the
world that youngsters of eight or nine
could easily read, and so attractively
presented that they'd want to.
If someone under sixty knows the
Greek myths, chances are she or he
first read them in the D'Aulaires'Book
of Greek Myths (1962), written and
illustrated by Ingri and Edgar Parin
d'Aulaire. The d'Aulaires had made
their mark with picture books about
children of the Northlands. Their pictorial biographies of all-time American
heroes had swept the field and earned
them a Caldecott (in 1940 ior Abraham
Lincoln).
They had no special knowledge of
Greek mythology and no particular
affinity for the accustomed art of classical Greece. Maybe being novices, like
children, was a benefit.
The oversize, exuberantly pictorial D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
is up to anything the gods offer. On
go the illustrations, page after page,
depicting every eye-blinking incident,
every fraught encounter, with intriguing charts for guidance. The narrative
speaks plain: "Zeus stood on Olympus
and shook his head. He had to stop
the careening chariot to save the earth
from destruction, and he threw a
thunderbolt at it."
Zlatelo the Goat and Other Stories
(1966) was written by the eminent
Polish-Jewish-American author Isaac
Bashevis Singer and illustrated by the
eminent American Jewish illustrator
Maurice Sendak. "Oh how I loved
this book as a child!" an online Seattle
Public Library reviewer writes. "I didn't
understand it was based on Jewish folk
tales..." If she didn't read the front
jacket flap, she wouldn't have. That's
not how the content was presented.
Some of the stories were derived
from folktales, some were original
with Singer, but he made them all his.
24 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010
I
Q
Sendak had only recently begun to
illustrate literary texts, and he'd done
nothing deeply, absorbingly Jewish. "Ihese clever, tender, bittersweet
tales.. .may be read silently or aloud,
but they are best shared, with ample
time to examine the subtleties of the
etched illustrations," I wrote for Kirkus
in 1966; and the comment stands.
Recently I heard one read aloud in a
college class.
Rabbit and other talking-animal tales.
Lester's take on black folklore ran to
folksong and the likes of Stagger Lee.
"Stagolee was, undoubtedly and without question, the baddest nigger that
ever lived. Stagolee was so bad that the
flies wouldn't even fly around his bead
in the summertime, and snow wouldn't
fall on his house in tbe winter."
ing features of the succeeding decades.
Lester was a storyteller born into
tbe tradition of the stories he told.
Verna Aardema was a Midwestern
schoolteacher, with literary aspirations,
who took a fancy to African stories
and adapted them for telling to her
students. The rest is publishing history:
thirty or so books, most of them picture
books, illustrated by a galaxy of assorted
talents.
This was tbe voice that later, in The
Tales of Uncle Remus (1987) and two
succeeding volumes (1988, 1990),
Two more, similar collections of
retold the hallowed stories of Joel
Singer stories appeared almost immeGhandler Harris, to the
diately, both illustrated
accompaniment ot crafty
by Margot Zemach. Tbe
The oversize,
illustrations by Jerry
celebrity of Singer and
exuberantly
pictorial
Pinkney, replacing A. B.
Sendak, and the inconD'Aulaires' Book of Frost and others. Lester's
testable success of their
was also the voice that
joint enterprise [Zlateh
Greek Myths is up
expanded on tbe legend
was a Newbery Honor
to anything the
oifohn Henry, in partBook, too), opened the
gods offer.
nership with stirring,
floodgate of Jewisb stosometimes spectacular
ries religious, traditional,
Pinkney spreads.
and anecdotal that was one of the definThe 1970s statistics are not impressive: 156 collections, 179 picture books.
Not until tbe late 1980s and the 1990s
would there be folklore matching and
even exceeding tbe 1960s in sheer
volume.
But other voices were ready to be
heard in tbe 1970s. Tbe decade was
kicked off in spirit by Julius Lester's
1969 Black Folktales. Lester had just
published, for adults, the expressly
militant Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's
Gon Get Your Mama! and the first
gleaning of WPA slave narratives for
children. To Be a Slave. Enough of Br'er
The most notable were Leo and
Diane Dillon. Among the head-turning
and prize-winning picture books of
recent decades, several have been based
on folklore. As illustrators recognized,
there was no end of pictorial potential
September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 25
in those imaginative realms. The Dillons, For their part, make high drama of
design. Action is Frozen in their images.
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears, a
Caldecott winner, and the cagey drama
Who's in Rabbit's House? stay in the
mind's eye.
As reigning illustrators, the Dillons even added luster to the work oF
one oFthe finest storytellers oF recent
times, Virginia Hamilton. From her
first book, Zeely (1967), Hamilton's
fiction had been inFused with a Folklore
spirit—the imaginary is real—and a
historical sense.
In The People Could Fly: American
Black Folktales (1985), she embraces
the literature From the animal tales to
the stories oF the supernatural to the
accounts oF runaway slaves. Where Lester elaborates, spins out, Hamilton talks
short and spare. You have to learn the
language. "Now, Facts are Facts. Wiley
was a boy. He and his mama lived by
themselves with just Wiley's dogs. Say
Wiley's papa Fell off the Ferry boat one
time..."
All folklore was not ethnic, either.
Picture-book versions oF the classic
Fairy tales continued to appear, many of
them splashy, empty, and evanescent.
But some had individuality. Fred Marcellino made something theatrical and
exciting oí Puss in Boots. Paul O. Zelinsky drew a haunted, near-surreal Hansel
and Gretel and won a Galdecott For his
imposing, somberly romantic Rapunzel.
Jan Brett Found the ideal vehicle For her
combination oF rustic décor, anecdotal
detail, and precise delineation in The
Mitten—and the public, I'm told, will
have no other version.
In the late 1980s and throughout
the 1990s, numbers dominated, and
now picture books were the name oF
the game. Gtedit the baby boomlet and
the explosion of multiculturalism—
together with the diffusion oF publish-
|r
>
As the houi hi ¡he perfoi
pproaches the Mu
viHagen gather before the closed cunam, w ai ting
expectantly.
Behind
urtain thi act its prepi n r»i I tand tbe
prop.T, ehearse the r lines. md dim their m asks.
1^
\
1
•• ^
26 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010
-"«ii
ing throughout the country. Of the
555 folklore picture books published
in the nineties (out of a total of 675
folklore books overall), between a third
and a half came from entities other
than established trade publishers, and
from locations other than New York
or Boston. Computerization made it
feasible; the clamor for ethnic material
made it creditable; the market made it
profitable.
Of late, blog posts by children's writers speak of a shrinkage in the publishing oí folklore, and scrutiny of entries
in The Horn Book Guide suggests that
relatively little original or ambitious
work is appearing. Meanwhile, a vast
amount of good work has been disappearing—some of it, like John Bierhorst's books of native literature of the
Americas and author-illustrator Marilyn
Hirsh's books of Jewish folklore, the
best of its kind.
All ofthat is retrievable, though:
Hirsh's Tlje Rabbi and the Twenty-nine
Witches, for one, has recently been
republished. And what remains is a
variety of approaches to familiar material, along with inventive presentations
of the newfound.
Take "Litde Red Riding Hood" in
just four of its countless embodiments.
There's a standard version from Trina
Schart Hyman with all the trimmings,
and a delicious spoof by James Marshall
oí George and Martha fame. There's Ed
Young's visually arresting Lon Po Po, a
tense Chinese story of disaster averted.
There's also Pretty Salma by South African author-illustrator Niki Daly, who
adroitly uses the Riding Hood story to
warn little African girls against sweettalking strangers. The story itself doesn't
stale, it ramifies.
Folklore by nature multiplies; children's books tend to run in series; and
tricksters are what brave little tailors
once were. So we have trickster tales
from around the world by authorillustrator Gerald McDermott, Caldecott winner and honorée. We have
(at least still on library shelves) Paul
Goble's many artful books about Iktomi
the Plains Indian trickster. We have
Anansi tales retold by Eric Kimmel and
illustrated by Janet Stevens, and Coyote
tales retold and pictured with vigor and
deadpan humor by Stevens herself
Children's Catalog has long lost its
sway; there's no more consensus or
canon. Successful books are what's seen,
read, and known.
As for The Lion and the Mouse, it
turns a simple metaphor into a richly
emotional story, as it always has been
for children. Folklore evolves. •
September/October 2010 Tlie Horn Book Magazine TJ
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