They jump off the shelves when Mom or Dad, or Nana or Pop Pop, aren’t looking they can be found lounging about on floor or bed or table, open and closed, their iconic splodges of color, which Carle magically turned into instantly recognizable shapes, innocently beaming up at you. Anyone who needs a present for a young child or baby knows you cannot go wrong with “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” or (my personal favorite for obvious reasons) “The Grouchy Lady Bug.”Īfter being tidied away, all manner of perfectly lovely and readable children’s books can be expected to remain exactly where they were put until an adult pulls them out again. In bookstores, of course, his titles have vanished from shelves for decades, whisked off in the millions by parents and grandparents, by aunts and uncles and teachers. (Jonathan Wiggs/Boston Globe via Getty Images)Įric Carle wrote books that refuse to stay on the shelf. He lives in Vermont, so he knows from trees.Eric Carle stands with large cutout of the iconic image from his children's book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass. I am sending him The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Look at that: We did! We were hungry we were curious we indulged in pleasure we appreciated we napped as necessary, self-actualized little connoisseurs. “ Caterpillar is a book of hope,” he said in the same interview. I’m about average when it comes to children: I like some, and some I don’t like.” But if he was grouchy, he wasn’t ungenerous. “I do, but I don’t want to be surrounded by them. “Everyone always assumes I love children,” he told the Times in the ’90s. In interviews, Carle could be more curmudgeonly than we expect of children’s authors. Then he gets a bellyache (relatable) and eventually blossoms into a gorgeous butterfly, resplendent in the colors of his snacks. For a kid in the city, these are the wonders of the world. He doesn’t explain his menu he’s an epicure without being a blowhard. After an initial chomp through an apple, a snack you might find in the forest, he moves on to the glories of civilization: a piece of Swiss cheese, a slice of salami, a chocolate cake. What was relatable about him was that he was barely natural at all he’s urbane. The journey of the book, a famished hero’s quest, takes him through the gorgeous products of the human world.
The caterpillar doesn’t have a name he just has a hunger. Looking at him now, he’s more artful than I remembered, like a Jules Olitski painting rendered in vibrating Rothko colors.
In Carle’s collages, he was blank-eyed but beautiful, a necklace of hairy hills borne on six little boot-like feet. Carle, who died earlier this week at 91, introduced him in 1969 by the time I was first discovering books in the late ’80s, I would’ve been in the second generation of kids to encounter him. He was Very Hungry.Įveryone I knew knew The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the star of Eric Carle’s award-winning picture book. I don’t remember ever meeting, let alone discovering, an actual caterpillar. (The great Frank O’Hara line: “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”) From knee-high, I was one of these. I grew up around concrete in New York City, a place that isn’t treeless so much as tree-agnostic: It’s entirely possible here to forget, if you’re inclined or condemned to do so, that things such as trees exist. If you have access to a lawn or a tree and enough patience to be vigilant, like a generous god or a short-order cook, the universe will provide.īut I didn’t.
They’re a good toddling, first-expedition find. The places they live aren’t distant or dangerous. They’re ground-floor specimens, so you don’t need reach or height. If you live somewhere where grass grows, they’re there, kid-size and kid-friendly: little, harmless, searchable. Photo: South China Morning Post via Getty ImagesĬaterpillars are entry-level fauna.
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