This April: Bringing New Talent and Ideas
- lindsey4824
- Apr 2, 2025
- 11 min read
Immigrants have been an essential part of innovation and progress in every part of American life and culture, including children’s literature. In fact, many of the titles that we consider staples of American children’s literature were created by immigrants.
Gustaf Tenggren, Margret and H.A. Rey, Laurent de Brunhoff, and Yuyi Morales all immigrated to the United States during the 20th century, and each has made remarkable contributions to the children’s books of their era and beyond.
This month join us for Story Hours and adult programming to learn more about these creators and celebrate their inspiring legacies.
Gustaf Tenggren 1896-1970
Gustaf was born in Sweden on November 3, 1896, the sixth of seven children. His mother struggled to support the family after his father left home to find work in the United States. As a result, around age 11, Gustaf began working as a runner boy and an apprentice at a lithographer's shop. It was there that his artistic talents were first noticed and he was able to attend art school through a series of scholarships. During the summers, Gustaf explored the countryside and forests with his grandfather, who was a woodcarver and painter.
From his earliest work illustrating fairy tales in the annual anthology, Bland Tomtar och Troll ("Among Gnomes and Trolls") to his later contributions to classic Walt Disney films, Swedish culture and the country’s landscape would have a life-long impact on Gustaf and his art.
Which witch? These three illustrations show the evolution of Gustaf's style. From left: Witch from Bland Tomtar och Troll (1922), Evil witch from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Hansel and Gretel witch from The Tenggren Tell-It- Again Book (1942).
In 1920, Gustaf came to the United States, first settling in Cleveland, Ohio where two of his older sisters lived. After two years of working a variety of illustration jobs, including drawing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and painting posters for a local theater, he moved to New York City. There he found work creating illustrations for magazines, advertising, and children’s books.
His work caught the attention of Walt Disney Studio, and in 1936 he was recruited to be the chief illustrator on its first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While at Disney, Gustaf worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Little Hiawatha, The Old Mill, and The Ugly Duckling, designing backgrounds, settings, characters, and sequences, as well as posters and other promotional materials.
After arriving in the United States, Gustaf worked to adapt his Arthur Rackham-esque illustrations to American tastes. After leaving Disney in 1939, he began illustrating for a new publishing venture that aimed at making quality books accessible to families and children. Priced at just 25 cents and widely distributed through supermarkets and drugstores, Little Golden Books sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first five months. Gustaf was among the flagship group of children’s book creators enlisted, which also included Margaret Wise Brown, Richard Scarry, Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky, and many more.
From 1942-1962 he illustrated 28 Little Golden Books, including The Poky Little Puppy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion.
In 2001 Publishers Weekly declared The Poky Little Puppy the best-selling children’s book of all time, having sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. On the 25th anniversary of its publication Gustaf remarked to his wife Mollie that he enjoyed having illustrated one of the few books to give the Holy Bible a run for its money!
“Since 1940, I have devoted my time to illustrating juvenile books,” Gustaf wrote in a biography for More Junior Authors. “I find this work very rewarding as it seems to give so much pleasure to so many children.”
In 1944 Gustaf and his family lived in Dogfish Head, Maine, where he continued to illustrate books including a series of fairy tales until his death from lung cancer on April 9, 1970.
H.A. Rey 1898-1977 & Margret Rey 1906-1996
Hans Augusto Reyersbach (H. A. Rey) was born in Germany in 1898. He was drawing by the age of two and often visited the nearby Tierpark Hagenbeck with his family, which fostered his love of animals. As a teenager he was drafted into the army during WWI. After serving two years, he went on to study languages, philosophy, and natural sciences at university. As a young man in Hamburg he met his future wife and collaborator Margret Waldstein. Both were of Jewish descent. She studied art at Bauhaus in Dessau, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and the University of Munich after which she began her career in advertising.
They met again in Brazil in 1935. Margret came to Rio de Janeiro to escape the rise of Nazism in Germany and Hans had been living there and selling bathtubs up and down the Amazon River. Within three months they were married and began working together on illustrations and art for magazines, advertising, and books. What began as a four-week honeymoon trip to Paris in 1936 turned into a four year stay. There, Hans created his first children’s book Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys. In 1940 the Reys narrowly escaped the Nazi invasion of Paris, leaving the city by bicycle with just their coats and several manuscripts they had salvaged, including Curious George. They rode their bicycles for four days before catching a train to Lisbon, then went on to Rio again, before eventually landing in New York City.
“On October 14, 1940, the Statue of Liberty greeted us through the morning mist,” Hans wrote. “We were prepared for a difficult start but fate was kind: within a month, four of the manuscripts we had brought along were accepted for publication. The autumn sky looked twice as blue to us the day we got this news.”
Curious George was an immediate hit and after its publication the Reys dedicated their lives to creating children’s literature.
In total they created seven Curious George stories as well as other beloved titles including Pretzel and Spotty. Although Hans mainly did the illustrations and Margret worked mostly on the stories, they shared the work and collaborated at every stage of development. Initially Margret's name was left off the cover of the Curious George, but this was corrected in later editions.
“...even those that do not show Margret’s name on the title owe much to her help: she usually does the text and criticizes my drawings while they are in progress,” Hans said in his autobiography for The Junior Book of Authors.
It was also Margret’s shrewd business acumen that contributed to their success. As one observer notes in the documentary, Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George's Creators, “It was sort of like he was all the sugar and she was all the spice.”
In addition to a fascination with drawing and animals as a young man, Hans loved astronomy and recreated his own constellation diagrams. He published several books about stars including The Stars: A New Way to See Them (for adults) and Find the Constellations (for children). Today Rey’s diagrams are widely used in astronomy guides and provide the perfect skyscape above The Rabbit hOle’s Curious George exhibit.
In the 1960s the Reys moved from Greenwich Village to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before it was common practice, the Reys regularly visited libraries, bookstores, and even the Boston Children’s Hospital, to promote and sign their books.
Hans died on August 26, 1977. Until her death on December 21, 1996, Margret continued writing books and became a professor of Creative Writing at Brandeis University. As she aged, people often remarked that Margret resembled Curious George, which she relished. Margret not only modeled for Hans’ drawings of the little monkey, but her insatiable curiosity had also inspired George’s spirit.
Jean de Brunhoff 1899-1937 & Laurent de Brunhoff 1925-2024
Jean de Brunhoff was born in Paris, France on December 9, 1899. His father, Maurice de Brunhoff, was a well-known and prosperous publisher, editing books on arts and culture. Jean attended the École alsacienne private school and joined the French army towards the end of World War I, serving briefly in the trenches on the frontlines. After the war he returned to Paris to study painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1924 he married pianist Cécile Sabouraud, with whom he had three sons, Laurent (1925), Mathieu (1926), and Thierry (1934).
It was Cécile who created Babar. One night at bedtime she told Laurent and Mathieu a story about a little elephant whose mother was shot by a hunter and must go to the city. The next day they shared the tale with their father who wrote it down and illustrated it. Jean’s brothers, who had become publishers and editors, convinced him to let them produce the book. An early version of the book listed Cécile as a co-author, but she requested that her name be removed. Histoire de Babar was published in 1931 and was an immediate success. An English version was published in 1933, with an introduction by Winnie-the-Pooh creator, A.A. Milne.
“Babar was always there,” Laurent told Publisher’s Weekly reflecting on his childhood years. “My father started to make the second book, Travels with Babar, the year after The Story of Babar; the year after that, Babar the King. Each year there was another title, another story. Babar was a brother, also a friend to my brother and me.”
During his lifetime Jean created six more Babar books. His final book, Babar and Father Christmas, was published in 1940, three years after his death in 1937, at age 37, from tuberculosis.
Laurent started drawing at a young age and followed in his father’s artistic footsteps. He also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with the same painting teacher, Fauvist Othon Friesz. During World War II he finished school and focused on painting. In 1946, at age 21, he wrote and illustrated Babar et ce coquin d'Arthur (Babar's Cousin: That Rascal Arthur). The gap between Jean’s last Babar book and Laurent’s first was only six years, with WWII in between, and most readers did not notice the change in authorship. Laurent immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. Until his death on March 22, 2024 in Key West, Florida, Laurent would create more than 45 Babar books.
Over the years, the Babar stories have been met with criticism, including some who argue that an African elephant educated in Paris who adopts Western culture is an allegory for French colonialism.
In a 2008 piece for The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik argues, “The de Brunhoffs’ saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.”
Laurent expressed regret for some of his depictions of Africans and Indigenous peoples, and asked his publisher to withdraw the 1949 book Babar’s Picnic.
Though controversial for some, the impact of the Babar books on children’s literature is undeniable. Maurice Sendak adored the little elephant and wrote in a 1951 homage to the series, “Like an extravagant piece of poetry, the interplay between few words and many pictures, commonly called the picture book, is a difficult, exquisite, and most easily collapsible form that few have mastered....Jean de Brunhoff was a master of this form. Between 1931 and 1937 he completed a body of work that forever changed the face of the illustrated book.”
The duality of Babar is represented in The Rabbit hOle’s exhibit featuring the nightmare scene from Babar the King. Painted on the ceiling with sculpted figures dangling below, it depicts angelic elephants representing goodness, hope, courage, patience, wisdom, and joy driving away the demons of misfortune, cowardice, anger, sickness, indolence, and fear.
Left: Babar ceiling mural at the Reading Reptile. Right: Babar exhibit at The Rabbit hOle.
Yuyi Morales 1968-
Yuyi Morales was born in Xalapa, Mexico, on November 7, 1968. Her introduction to art came from her mother. In the biography on her website it says, “The first years of Yuyi’s life were marked by both scarcity and creativity. Yuyi and her two sisters did not have the same clothes or receive the same presents as their schoolmates. Instead, their mother sewed Yuyi and her sisters’ clothes, bedsheets, curtains, and lampshades. When the family couldn’t afford the gifts the girls wanted for their birthdays, Yuyi’s mother would make everything from the cakes to the invitations to their dresses to their shoes.”
Although Yuyi grew up always making and creating alongside her mother and showed artistic promise in school, the idea of being an artist was not a possibility for her and she planned to become a swimming teacher. In high school she moved to Veracruz to pursue competitive swimming and studied physical education and psychology at La Universidad Veracruzana.
In 1993 she met her future husband, Tim O'Meara, an American living in Xalapa. When Tim’s grandfather became ill, Yuyi and their infant son Kelly came to the United States on a K1 Fiancé Visa, which, “obligated [her] to live as a resident in the United States, or she would lose her visa.”
What she thought would be a temporary visit turned into 20 years. In the beginning Yuyi was terribly homesick and living with her in-laws, but a trip to the local library changed everything. In the children’s section she found refuge and inspiration. She pored over countless titles which helped her learn English and she got her first library card thanks to a kind librarian at the San Francisco Public Library’s Western Addition.
“Yuyi began taking literal piles of books home with her, to the point that Kelly’s stroller once broke under the weight of so many books,” her website says. “As Yuyi devoured more and more children’s books, the letters she wrote to her family began to take on a form not unlike the books she so loved.”
With her interest in storytelling, Yuyi began hosting a children’s segment called Pájaro Latinoamericano on the San Francisco radio station KPOO and enrolled in extension class on children’s book illustration at UC Berkeley. In 2000 she won the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators’ Don Freeman Grant. Shortly after, in 2001, she illustrated her first book, Todas las Buenas Manos written by Isabel Campoy.
To illustrate her second book, Harvesting Hope, written by Kathleen Krull about Mexican-American civil rights and labor activist Cesar Chavez, she spent time in California’s Central Valley “to see the farms and crops whose workers Chavez fought for and met with labor leaders and activists who had known him.”
Whether through dedicated research or personal experience, Yuyi brings incredible care and authenticity to her books. Her book Dreamers is both a memoir about coming to the United States, and a celebration of the resilience and hope of all immigrants.
"Dreamers is about my own immigration story and how I found a world of wonder and hope for myself and my son at the public library. While it’s my own story, it is also a story about what it is like to move to a new place, finding yourself alone and confused, and learning that you can make a home in a new country,” Yuyi said in a 2019 interview with Mother Mag.
“At first, I didn’t think it was important to share my story, but I then realized that by not believing my story was important, I was also telling other people—especially children—that their stories as immigrants also weren’t important. And that isn’t true. Every story matters."
So far Yuyi has created 17 books, received six Pura Belpré Medals for Illustration, and was the first Latina to win a Caldecott Honor. Since 2013, Yuyi has lived primarily in her hometown of Xalapa, where she is an activist and continues creating a variety of work.
Niño Wrestles the World, which Yuyi wrote and illustrated, will be a featured exhibit on The Rabbit hOle’s second floor. It is currently in the design and construction planning stages.
In this multiple award-winning story, Niño imagines himself a champion luchador who can take all comers, in this world or any other. His imaginings come to life as he finds himself challenged by the most terrifying of opponents, successfully dispatching them with a variety of daring and playful moves. That is, until the clock strikes three, and he must face the most terrifying opponents of all...Las Hermanitas!
