The most beloved children’s books are also remembered fondly by grown-ups, but there’s always something new to learn about them. Which rhyming classic, now a standard part of any nursery, had dismal sales at first? What was Where the Wild Things Are originally about — and where did the titular Wild Things come from? Which author started her iconic tales by writing letters?
From innovative illustrations to a bestseller written on a $50 bet, these six facts about favorite children’s books will send you straight to the library for a little rereading.
“Goodnight Moon” Wasn’t a Huge Success at First
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the most famous children’s books of all time — but it was never a big success during the author’s lifetime. It sold just 6,000 copies when it first came out in the fall of 1947, and reviews were middling to mixed. So what happened?
One possible reason for its initial popularity problem could be Anne Carroll Moore, former head of New York Public Library’s children’s services and a wildly influential figure in the children’s literature world. If Moore hated a book, it made an impact that reverberated far beyond the Empire State, and she thought that Goodnight Moon was cloyingly sentimental. The book eventually became popular probably by word of mouth, but it took a long time: The title sold 4,000 copies in 1955, 8,000 copies in 1960, then nearly 20,000 in 1970, and only went up from there. It has never been out of print. Even the New York Public Library finally put it in circulation in 1972 — although the delay likely kept it off their Top Checkouts of All Time list.
At least Goodnight Moon was in good company. While Moore made many library innovations that we take for granted today, including the very idea of having a space for children at a library, she had some controversial opinions on the books themselves. She had an intense professional relationship with author E. B. White that eventually became adversarial, and hated Stuart Little with a passion — although her effort to ban it from libraries and schools got severe pushback from other parts of the literary community. She wasn’t a huge fan of Charlotte’s Web, either, but her influence had waned by the time it was published.
“The Tale of Peter Rabbit” Started as a Letter to a Sick Child
At age 27, author Beatrix Potter wrote an eight-page letter, hoping to cheer up the sick 5-year-old child of her former governess. In it, she told a story of Peter Rabbit and his siblings Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-Tail. Potter loved making watercolor images of animals, so she illustrated the tale before sending it off.
Publishing was not part of the original plan, but after getting an overwhelmingly positive response to her letter, she decided to send it around to publishers. After getting rejected at least six times, Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit independently in 1901. The next year it was picked up by a major publisher, became a major hit, and the rest is history.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit isn’t the only Potter story to start this way. Others, including The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and some other Peter Rabbit books, were also based on illustrated letters sent to children.
Nobody Knows Who Actually Wrote “The Little Engine That Could”
Today, there’s a standard edition of The Little Engine That Could, immortalized as a standalone children’s book in 1930. That version credits the story “as retold by” Watty Piper, a pseudonym for children’s book publisher Arnold Munk — because the tale actually dates back far enough that it’s practically considered a folktale.
One Little Engine enthusiast even found a version published in Sweden in 1903. In 1906, a minister used a version of the story, complete with “I think I can” and “I thought I could,” as a parable in a sermon published in a newspaper. By 1920, the story was already in wide circulation. The 1930 version’s closest relative is The Pony Engine, published in a children’s magazine by educator Mabel Bragg in 1916. There was a legal battle in the 1950s over whether another author published a similar version in a series of newsletters in the early 1910s.
The original author’s identity remains unknown, and, with traces dating back about 120 years, anyone with direct knowledge of the story’s beginnings is almost certainly dead. At this point, maybe it’s a collaborative work, anyway.
Maurice Sendak’s “Wild Things” Were Originally Horses
It’s hard to imagine a world without Where the Wild Things Are, but if author and illustrator Maurice Sendak had just been a little better at drawing horses, things could have turned out much differently.
“At first,” Sendak told the LA Times in 1993, “the book was to be called ‘Where the Wild Horses Are,’ but when it became apparent to my editor I could not draw horses, she kindly changed the title to ‘Wild Things,’ with the idea that I could at the very least draw ‘a thing’!”
Now tasked with drawing “things,” Sendak turned to his extended family for inspiration. As a child, he dreaded when his “hideous, beastly relatives,” with what he described as bad breath, blood-stained eyes, and giant yellow teeth, would show up for dinner, ready to squeeze and pinch him.
“So I drew my relatives,” Sendak continued. “They’re all dead now, so I can tell people.”
The Illustrations in “A Snowy Day” Are Mixed-Media Collages
A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats was groundbreaking in many ways when it was first published in 1962: It was one of the first, if not the first, American full-color children’s books to feature a Black protagonist, for example, and one of just a handful of them to feature an urban landscape. The collaged illustrations, which earned Keats a Caldecott Medal, were fresh and innovative, using a combination of cloth, paper, and paint to create Peter and a snow-covered New York City.
Keats had illustrated children’s books before, and typically only used paint, which was the original plan for A Snowy Day. Instead, he fell into collage, making paper cutouts for the buildings, adding fabric embellishments, and dressing Peter’s mother in oilcloth. He also used homemade snowflake stamps and applied India ink with a toothbrush to complete the look. He continued to use collage for all his future works.
“Green Eggs and Ham” Has a 50-Word Vocabulary
In his earlier career, Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel was a little wordier; his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, is a little bit of a mouthful in the title alone. So how did we get from there to, say, Hop on Pop?
For The Cat in the Hat, Geisel’s publisher challenged him to limit his vocabulary to just 225 words chosen from a 348-word early reader vocabulary list, making it both easy and exciting for very young children learning to read. He picked the first two rhyming words he saw, “cat” and “hat,” and built the entire plot from there. The finished product was 11 words over the limit, at 236.Soon afterward, Geisel’s publisher gave him a new, more difficult challenge — write a book using only 50 words — and bet him $50 he couldn’t do it. This time, the author stuck to the limit, and the result was “Green Eggs and Ham.”