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With the death of Arnold Lobel at the age of only 54 in 1987 America lost one of its best and most popular children's book creators. "Easy readers," books designed for beginning readers, seldom win the major children's literature awards because they are usually thought to contain too few words to establish the literary distinction necessary to win the Newbery and too many words to allow for the illustrational distinction needed to merit the Caldecott. Lobel's efforts as an artist-writer of easy readers have, however, been singled out for both Caldecott and Newbery honors, as well as for numerous other awards. The universality and whimsicality of Lobel's tales contribute to their popularity, as do the inexpensive standardized format and effective marketing employed by Harper & Row (now known as HarperCollins) for all its easy-reader paperbacks. It is safe to say that every public library in America (and a multitude of homes) are in possession of well-worn copies of "I Can Read" books by Arnold Lobel. The Frog and Toad series is by far the most popular, but his books with grasshopper, owl, mouse and elephant protagonists also have wide appeal.
In a number of the most characteristic books of Arnold Lobel the central personalities are handled i one of three ways: either there is a solitary, highly emotional (one might even say foolish) individual, a solitary reasonable individual, or there are two complementary personalities, one more foolish and the other relatively more reasonable. It would be tempting to call the foolish personality childish or child-like as opposed to the presumably more adult demeanor of the reasonable personality, but Lobel would be quick remind us that children and adults are not, at bottom, different kinds of persons. Adults and children have the same kinds of hopes, fears and foolishnesses even though the details of what they are concerned about may differ. Lobel pointed out in a 1971 interview in The Lion and the Unicom that "a child's sense of humor and an adult's sense of humor are rather the same. And if you don't have a sense of humor when you're a child, you're not going to have one when you're an adult" (84).
It might be expected that the punch line of my essay would...