Ruth Krauss

Early life and education

Ruth Ida Krauss was born July 25, 1901, in Baltimore, Maryland to Julius Leopold and Blanche Krauss. Her father was of Hungarian and German Jewish descent and worked in the family business as a furrier. As a child, Ruth had numerous health problems, including the rare autoimmune disorder pemphigus. She began writing and illustrating her own stories while still a child, hand sewing her pages into books.

Ruth went to a local high school but left in 1917 after her sophomore year to focus on the study of art. She enrolled in the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art). The school's focus on applied arts did not suit her and she left after about a year. Her next stop was a girls camp, Camp Walden in Maine, where she discovered her love for writing; the camp yearbook for 1919 contains her first published piece of writing. After the camp, she spent some time studying violin in the Peabody Institute of Music's preparatory program; she was considered a gifted but undisciplined musician by her teachers.

Ruth's father died in late 1921, following which Ruth dropped out of school and took a series of office jobs. In 1927, her mother died and she decided to enroll at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Graduating from Parsons in 1929, as the Great Depression was beginning, she found it difficult to get work as an illustrator. Among the work she did find in this period was the first pictorial book jacket for the Modern Library (Alice in Wonderland, 1932).

Ruth was a member of the Writers' Laboratory at the Bank Street College of Education in New York during the 1940s.

In the 1930s, Ruth was married to journalist and crime novelist Lionel White; they divorced shortly before World War II.

Personal life and career

Ruth Krauss married children's book author Crockett Johnson in 1943. They collaborated on many books, among them The Carrot Seed, How to Make an Earthquake, Is This You? and The Happy Egg.

Another eight of her books were illustrated by Maurice Sendak, starting with A Hole Is to Dig (1952), which launched Sendak's career. The Krauss-Sendak collaborations spawned a host of imitators of their "unruly" and "rebellious" child protagonists. The peculiar definitional phrasing of Krauss's writing in this book—with sentences like "A party is to make little children happy"—became something of a cultural phenomenon when the book was first published and has helped to maintain its popularity.

Krauss also illustrated a few of her own books. In addition to her books for children, Krauss wrote three collections of poetry and plays in verse for adults.

Krauss survived her husband by eighteen years, dying in Westport, Connecticut, on July 10, 1993.

Recognition

Two books that Krauss wrote were runners-up for the prestigious Caldecott Medal, which is awarded to children's book illustrators:The Happy Day (1950) and A Very Special House (1954). Maurice Sendak characterized Krauss as a giant in the world of children's literature, saying: "Ruth broke rules and invented new ones, and her respect for the natural ferocity of children bloomed in to poetry that was utterly faithful to what was true in their lives". He honored her in the New Yorker cover illustration for Sept. 27, 1993, which shows a homeless boy using Krauss's book A Hole Is to Dig as a pillow.

Children's books

Poetry and verse plays