As happens with some children and some books, Suzanne demanded to hear it over and over. I first discovered Cooney when a friend gave my 3-year-old daughter a copy of Miss Rumphius (1982). Her singular vision of young Americans and her unique ideas about how to write for them make her books more relevant to Americans today-and perhaps more necessary-than ever before.

But Cooney’s greatest gifts, manifest in her work from the start, are more profound.

Her books are still beloved, nearly two decades after her death, by readers who admire their visual charm and rich historical storytelling. She illustrated or wrote some 100, including modern classics such as Miss Rumphius and Ox-Cart Man (which garnered her another Caldecott Medal, in 1980). Barbara Cooney went on to have a long and celebrated career in American picture books.

By shaping the attitudes and aspirations of children, they help shape the world those children will grow up to inherit. They reflect how a society sees its young and itself. “Much of what I put into my pictures,” she admitted, “will not be understood.” But she had chosen to write it because she thought that the “children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting.” “It does not hurt them,” Cooney insisted before her audience of senior librarians and educators, to hear about the real stuff of life, about “good and evil, love and hate, life and death.” (She did not say so that evening, but she had already experienced a good bit of each.) She vowed that she would never “talk down to-or draw down to-children.” By shaping the aspirations of their young audience, children’s books help shape the world those children will inherit.Ĭhildren’s books are more than just entertainment. In her acceptance speech for the award, the small blond author, gesturing with her long hands, conceded the anomaly of her book. The book ends with the rooster and the fox conversing, each ruing his own foolishness and impulsiveness. Just as the fox is about to devour him, the rooster turns the tables, tricks the fox into opening his mouth, and escapes. Adapted from the salty Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, the book tells the story of a proud rooster, Chanticleer, who falls prey to a fox’s flattery. It recognized Chanticleer and the Fox, the first picture book written by a young illustrator named Barbara Cooney. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.īut the Caldecott Medal, the premier American award for picture books, registered a note of dissent.

Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney