The New Yorker:

Decades before “Inside Out,” the author showed us the inner life of kids—and the strangeness of their imagination.

By Adrienne Raphel

In 1952, a book appeared that redefined children’s literature. “A lap is so you don’t get crumbs on the floor,” it proclaimed. “A mustache is to wear on Halloween. A hat is to wear on a train.” The book didn’t even try to tell a story. Instead, it spoke in associative logic and whimsical spot illustrations, leapfrogging from definition to definition, explaining how the world works. Its author, Ruth Krauss, had gathered many of the definitions from actual children—including the book’s title, “A Hole Is to Dig”—and worked with a little-known twenty-three-year-old artist named Maurice Sendak to draw the squirmy, cheeky kids on each page. As Krauss told her editor, the Harper & Row legend Ursula Nordstrom, “I’m afraid I’ll have a good book in spite of myself.”

In the past two months, New York Review Books reissued “The Backward Day” (1950) and“Everything Under a Mushroom” (1973), two works that frame Krauss’s career. “The Backward Day,” with spare line drawings by Marc Simont, tells the story of a boy who wakes up one morning, declares that “Today is backward day,” and goes about his morning in reverse. “Everything Under a Mushroom” is even more formally strange: each of the book’s two-page spreads features a simple, hypnotic poem and, underneath it, a richly panoramic scene by Margot Tomes. Taken together, the books showcase how Krauss pioneered a method that now seems intuitive: portraying the world from the perspective of a child’s imagination.

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