How to Draw the World: ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ and the Making of a Children’s Classic

Nel (Was the Cat in the Hat Black?), an English professor at Kansas State University, presents a cerebral examination of Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon series, the first of which was published in 1955. He argues that Johnson’s style and narrative choices were influenced by modernist painter Paul Klee’s art school lectures (collected in the 1925 compilation Pedagogical Sketchbook), pointing out that Klee’s discussion of “how receding railroad tracks persuade the eye to ‘see’ three dimensions” is reflected in a scene from A Picture for Harold’s Room when “Harold steps off the railway he has drawn, and suddenly realizes that his apparent smallness is all a trick of perspective.” Speculating on the inspiration behind the Harold series, Nel suggests that the FBI’s investigation into Johnson’s left-wing political associations might have influenced the book’s veneration of free artistic expression. Elsewhere, Nel offers a thought-provoking exploration of whether Harold’s “tawny skin” constituted an attempt by Johnson to smuggle a subtle pro–civil rights message past his unsympathetic editor. Some of Nel’s assertions are too nebulous to convince, as when he contends that the “most powerful effect” of Harold’s Garamond font “is the invisibility of its legibility,” but Nel’s serious consideration of Johnson’s artistic process makes a strong case that “children’s books are not a lesser art form.” It’s a loving, scholarly ode to a children’s literature classic. (Nov.)