He also captures the fun of being a young child in Maine in the books Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine. We hear “the sound of growing ferns, pushing aside dead leaves, unrolling their fiddleheads” and wait with electric anticipation as a storm approaches the island. Here, the island’s intricate secrets reveal themselves to those paying close attention. The full-color illustrations in Time of Wonder, capture why a book about a summer in Maine deserves such a title. >McCloskey’s love of Maine is revealed in his illustrations and prose. In 2000, he was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress. Although he wrote and illustrated only eight books, he won the Caldecott Medal twice: in 1941 for Make Way for Ducklings and again in 1957 for Time of Wonder. Despite being “sort of an accident,” McCloskey’s children’s books became instant classics. “My first book I wrote to have something to illustrate,” McCloskey said. After two rather unsuccessful years of trying to sell his art, McCloskey turned to writing children’s books. “I really think up stories in pictures and just fill in between the pictures with a sentence or a paragraph or a few pages of words.” McCloskey studied art at the Vesper George School of Art in Boston and later at the National Academy of Design in New York. “It is just sort of an accident that I write books,” he once said. However, his later books, including Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, and Time of Wonder, take place on islands off the coast of Maine, where McCloskey lived with his wife and daughters.īorn in Ohio in 1914, McCloskey seemed to think of himself as more of an illustrator than a writer. McCloskey is arguably most well known for Make Way for Ducklings, which is set in Boston.
Yet it is also a place that requires work, where you need to row a boat to the mainland to buy milk or repair engines, and batten down the hatches when a storm blows in.
It is a place where a hill thick with blueberries comes alive with curious surprises. In Robert McCloskey’s children’s books, Maine is a place where life moves with the shifting tides and seasons.
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