Children's book expert Anita Silvey asked a wide range of public figures: “What children's book changed the way you see the world?”

In her new book, Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book (Roaring Brook, Oct.), she includes answers from more than 100 people, from financiers to actors, from athletes to singers; for this excerpt, we have chosen responses from those directly involved in creating books for young people.

Peter SísThe book that most influenced my life—perhaps even my entire career—is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which I discovered sometime between the ages of 12 and 14. My father had told me about it, and I was afraid I might not be up to understanding it. Since my father had a very vivid imagination, it was sometimes difficult for me to live up to his expectations. But The Little Prince turned out to be just perfect for my age and my state of mind. It was completely different from anything I had known up to this point in my life.I believe that I cried when I read the book. The Little Prince showed me that very individual and personal feelings could be communicated in a story. But it also showed me that an artist could incorporate these feelings and emotions in the drawings.Jean Craighead George
My mother read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to my brothers and me in the evening while we gathered around her chair. As I listened with my eyes closed, in my mind I created the raft, the Mississippi River, and Huckleberry and his friends. It was easy. Mark Twain was an on-scene writer.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is unforgettable because Mark Twain knew what he was writing about—the Mississippi and its people and ecology. Having learned that lesson, when I began my writing career, I wrote about what I knew. Or, if the environment was strange to me, I traveled there to live for a while. I learned about the plants and animals and climate, and interacted with the people. When I returned home to write, I would then close my eyes, return to the locale, open my eyes, and write.
Leonard S. Marcus
The first book I recall asking my parents for was the Young Readers Edition of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. I was 10, and a history buff, and I had campaigned for Kennedy by distributing leaflets in my neighborhood. I had done so not at my parents' urging but because after studying the saucy caricatures of all the candidates on the cover of Mad, I had simply decided—as though it were the most obvious thing in the world to do—to get involved in the election and to throw my support behind JFK.
Profiles in Courage's idealistic message of sticking to principle regardless of the consequences appealed greatly to my 10-year-old sense of idealism and high purpose. Even more powerful for me than the theme of Kennedy's book, however, was the mere fact that the president of the United States had written it. The only other president I knew anything about from firsthand observation, Dwight Eisenhower, had been little more to me than a kindly, balding television grandfather figure. I now saw that a president could also be a vibrant young man, and (even better) that he could be a writer, too—just as I dreamed of being one day.
Sherman Alexie
When I was growing up—a registered member of Spokane and Coeur d'Alene tribes—The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats was pretty much the only children's book that featured a protagonist with dark skin. I vividly remember the first day I pulled that book off the shelf. It was the first time I looked at a book and saw a brown, black, beige character—a character who resembled me physically and spiritually, in all his gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation. I was somewhat of a hermit, even at a very young age.
The Snowy Day transformed me from someone who read regularly into a true book hound. I really think the age at which you find the book with which you truly identify determines the rest of your reading life. The younger you are when you do that, the more likely you're going to be a serious reader.
Maurice Sendak
Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon is just immense fun. Harold does exactly as he pleases. There are no adults to demonstrate or remonstrate. The book comes out of a particular theory of children's books: Just let the kid do his own thing; let him have fun.

Books shouldn't teach. They shouldn't give lessons. Kids should feel that they can do what they want to do and no one will punish them. They can just be kids and enjoy reading and looking at a book.
Beverly Cleary
As a child, I owned only two books: The Story of the Three Bears and the Volland Mother Goose. But because of my mother's efforts to organize a local library above a bank, crates of books began to arrive from the Oregon State Library for the children of Yamhill. What good books they were! Those crates included fairy tales by Joseph Jacobs and lots of small picture storybooks by Beatrix Potter.
My favorite was The Tailor of Gloucester. Not only did I love the story, but I was entranced by the picture of the waistcoat so beautifully embroidered by mice. I studied that picture and knew that someday I, too, wanted to sew beautifully.
For many years, I have patterned stories instead. My first ideas grew out of my own work with children as a librarian. The books that I write are the stories I wanted to read as a child. Decades have passed since I first encountered books, but even as a child I recognized that reading gave people power.
Wendell Minor
When I was a boy in middle school, Treasure Island was one of my favorite books, the Scribner's Classic edition, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. Suffering from dyslexia, I was starved for visual information. The pictures in that book allowed me to create my own visual realm. His illustrations in this volume—like “Blind Pew”—are so dynamic and exciting.
Although [Wyeth] always lamented that he was not considered a fine artist, his work has had lasting influence. Children are more affected by the art in their books than is any adult by fine art in a gallery. More people saw and responded to N.C. Wyeth's work in his lifetime than reacted to the work of Edward Hopper in his.
Ultimately, Wyeth influenced my decision to become a book illustrator, rather than a gallery artist. At one point I was selected to illustrate one of the first Scribner Classics to be released in over 50 years: Jack London's The Call of the Wild. On the back jacket, my name is listed between N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. In my mind, the back jacket of that book is more important than the front jacket.
David Macaulay
As a child living in Bolton, England, I collected money for the Methodist Missionary Society. Every Saturday morning, I'd have a set number of subscribers that I visited and gathered money from, maybe only one or two pennies a week. By the end of the year, I had collected six pounds, 16 shillings and seven pence to help support various programs in Africa. As a reward, I was allowed to go to the local bookstore and choose any book I wanted.
I located a new, big science book, called in England The Encyclopaedia of Science for Boys and Girls. The book was large and impressive. On the cover it featured inventions like headphones and included many subject areas (air, seas, inventions, plants, and animals). My instant response was that it must include everything I would ever need to know.
From it I learned that everything is interesting if you stop and look at it; I was introduced to a whole range of topics, many of which I would one day explore and discover for myself. The book's connection to my own titles, such as The Way Things Work, seems quite obvious to me many years later. I was so positively affected by this book that I wanted to make others like it; it's the kind of book I found fascinating as a child and still do as an adult. The Encyclopaedia of Science for Boys and Girls gave me ownership of my world by making a world of information accessible, fun, and exciting.
Thacher Hurd
The Wind in the Willows was given to me at Christmas when I was seven by my grandfather, John H. Thacher. I loved the settings, the coherent little world in which everything happened in a soothing way. I was fascinated by what Mr. Toad (surely the id personified) was going to do next. What new way was he going to find to get into trouble? But the subtler story is the friendship between Rat and Mole, a wonderful relationship that really anchored the book for me. I could see all the ways in which they cared about each other. The Ernest Shepard illustrations were also an important part of the book; these illustrations expressed the emotions perfectly.
When I was in college, I lived in a communal household with six or seven people. One night we gathered in a tiny bedroom at the back of the house. We scrunched together on the bed and around the floor, and we read The Wind in the Willows aloud to each other. The book cast a spell over us—a soothing, peaceful aura to our gathering—as it always does when one gives oneself over to the world of Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad. So I read this book as a child, in college, and as an adult. At all these ages, I have responded to the deep reassurance of its stories.
Eric Rohmann
Growing up I was not much of a reader, but eventually reading found its way. I began with DC Comic books—Superman and Batman—a few picture books, and the occasional true-nature tale. And then there was my third-grade teacher, Ms. Cerny, who at the end of each week brought us stories.
On Friday afternoon she would take the last hour of class to read to us. I can still close my eyes and remember the details: the pale yellow classroom, her precise pronunciation, the sunlight drifting in, the row of primers on the counter along the windows. And on that very first Friday, the book in her hands was Charlotte's Web. The experience of being in that classroom, listening along with my friends who were also caught up in the story, was the first time I'd really fallen into a book, moved by the emotion of the reading of a story.
Marc Brown
Through art books I discovered the work of Marc Chagall; I was so impressed that I changed my name from Mark to Marc. My favorite teacher, my high school art teacher, gave me the best advice I ever got. She told me that if I wanted to be successful, I should do what I really loved doing and execute it as well as I could.
I also read the book that made a huge difference in my life, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. I was so moved by what Sendak was able to accomplish in that book with a minimum of words. It was as if a light bulb went off in my head. I had no idea about the potential that the field of children's books held until I looked at Where the Wild Things Are. Recently I was perusing my high school yearbook and noticed that under my picture, in the blank after the word ambition, I wrote illustrator. That was definitely a “post-Sendak” ambition.
Eden Ross Lipson
When I was nine, I encountered a series of books that I have loved all my life. The stories about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family as they progress from Wisconsin to South Dakota, through good times and bad, unselfconsciously recall the expansionist era in American history. The books describe a self-sufficient, brave, and proud family. They give precise, accurate details of the changing American life that shifted quickly from rural to agricultural on its way to industrial.
There is no magic in the Little House books—no invisible railway platform leading to a fantastic place, no wizards at all. This plain account focuses on ordinary lives, but that is why it is so thrilling and engrossing. The family's ordinary lives are so far from our own, unimaginably remote to today's children. But the lesson the books taught me, and still teach without comment, is that there is dignity, honor, and pleasure in work well done.