The authors give life to a man whose art is beautifully simple, and yet complex. The preface and both essays are relatively short, yet informative. The book’s publication coincided with the 50 th anniversary of The Snowy Day and with an exhibit of the artwork of Keats at The Jewish Museum in New York. Two years before The Snowy Day was published, he cowrote another pioneering book, My Dog is Lost!, with Pat Cherr in which the protagonist is a young Puerto Rican boy. In this book, the collaborators explore his childhood, artistic history and expound upon his groundbreaking art. He eventually grew as an artist and put those harrowing days into his beautiful urban cityscapes where most of the protagonists of his books lived. His childhood was not what anyone would call ideal, growing up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood to parents whose marriage was one of convenience rather than love. Jacob Ezra Katz (Ezra Jack Keats) was born in Brooklyn in 1916 to poor Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. He made a prominent place for characters and places that had not been represented in children’s books, saying about Peter, “My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.” Keats’s awareness of the city, its daily hum, and the role of its children are deeply felt and delicately rendered in words and bright collages and paintings.
The book was a runaway success, capturing the Caldecott Medal and selling more than two million copies. The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keatsįrom the dust jacket: “In 1962, Ezra Jack Keats’s children’s book The Snowy Day introduced readers to young Peter, the first African-American protagonist in a full-color picture book, who traipsed alone the snowy, wonderous sidewalks of the inner city.
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