8 /10 1 Votes
Country United States ISBN 978-0-670-53328-2 Dewey Decimal [E] 19 Originally published 1979 Genre Picture book Publisher Viking Press | 4/5 Goodreads Publication date 1979 OCLC 4883766 LC Class PZ7.H14115 Ox Illustrator Barbara Cooney Awards Caldecott Medal | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Similar Barbara Cooney books, Caldecott Medal winners, Picture books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ox-Cart Man is the title of a 1979 book written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. It won the 1980 Caldecott Medal. The book tells of the life and work of an early 19th-century farming family in New Hampshire. The father uses an ox-cart to take their goods to market in Portsmouth, where they make the money to buy the things they need for the next year. Even the ox and cart are sold.
Hall originally published "Ox-Cart Man" as a poem in the October 3, 1977 issue of The New Yorker. Hall revised the poem greatly to create the children's book and chose Barbara Cooney for its illustrations. (Cooney had illustrated another Caldecott Medal-winning book, Chanticleer and the Fox.) Both the earlier version of the poem and the book are cyclical in narrative and theme.
This book was featured on a Season 2 episode of Reading Rainbow.