Roger Angell wrote a Profile of Steig for the magazine, in 1995, which recounts that it was at the urging of his fellow-cartoonist Robert Kraus that Steig turned to children’s books-to make money, Steig claimed. Steig was, of course, known for his comics and covers for The New Yorker. Despite the jaunty animal protagonists and inexplicable magic, Steig seems to me to be one of the more realist of writers for children. Beauty and dread coexist there is whimsy, even silliness, but also palpable anxiety, peril, and despair in Steig’s world-or maybe this is just the real world. His books are silly and sweet, as books for children should be, but they are also unsettling, strange, and sometimes scary. Doing one or the other is hard enough, and only a select handful of geniuses can manage both. Writers for young children have a nearly impossible task: to amuse both the kid being read to and the adult doing the reading.
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