https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/business/media/marianne-carus-dead.html
By Clay Risen
Published March 19, 2021
Most of it (there's also a charming photo of Carus and her two granddaughters, wearing white campesina dresses):
Marianne Carus, the German-born, Sorbonne-educated founder of Cricket, the lively and erudite monthly magazine often called “The New Yorker for kids,” died on March 3 at her home in Peru, Ill. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Inga Carus.
Ms. Carus (pronounced CARE-us) began Cricket in 1973 after years of dismay over what she considered the sorry state of children’s reading material, including the books that her own three children brought home from school.
“Good literature is literature you cannot put down,” she explained in a 2018 interview for the library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. “And children for some reason did not get the best literature in the schools or in their homes.”
There were other magazines aimed at children in the 1970s, including Highlights and Ranger Rick, but Ms. Carus considered them insubstantial and condescending. She cut Cricket from finer cloth: It came bound like a paperback book, with enchanting hand-
drawn covers labeled with the volume and issue number; inside, not a single ad interrupted the flow of fiction, biographies and science stories.
“Only Cricket seems to fly out of the mailbox straight from neverland, trailing clouds of something special,” the children’s author Jane Langton wrote in The New York Times in 1974.
The magazine blended serious literature with childhood frivolity: A story by John Updike could be followed by a comic strip, or a poem by Nikki Giovanni could come after knock-knock jokes.
Lest it still be confused with the The New York Review of Books, Cricket’s art director, Trina Schart Hyman, filled its margins with characters like Fat Ladybug, Ugly Bird and a know-it-all cricket named Cricket, who commented on the stories and
explained challenging words.
The magazine was an overnight success, with more than 250,000 subscribers after the first year. Though that number subsided over time, Cricket maintained an intensely loyal following, as evidenced by the overflowing bags of fan mail and submissions to
its art and writing contests.
Like Ms. Carus, the typical Cricket reader was intelligent and urbane, often far beyond his or her preteen years, and felt constrained by a culture that in the 1970s still relegated children to the edges of adult life.
“In the summer I write and edit a newspaper,” one 9-year-old correspondent wrote in a letter to the editor. “To my readers I say Cricket is the No. 1 magazine for children. I hope I give you some more readers. Good luck.”
While there was a good deal of fun to be had in the pages of Cricket, there was never a doubt about Ms. Carus’s faith in the nurturing capacity of big words and richly told stories.
“So many people talk down to children, but you have to respect their intelligence,” she said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1982. “Parents give them the best clothes, the best food, the best toys, when what they should be giving them is
food for their little brains.”...
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...The Caruses spent long stretches in Germany, and André, their oldest child, started the first grade there. When they returned, they noticed the disparity between the challenging, rich texts used in German schools and what they considered the plodding,
condescending materials used in America.
In 1963 the Caruses created a series of elementary-school readers, full of advanced vocabulary and complex stories. But the books struggled to win over teachers who were more familiar with the slow-going “look-say” method of reading instruction.
“They were aghast at what Dick and Jane had done to American reading,” John Grandits, Cricket’s first designer, said in a phone interview.
The Caruses tried a different approach a decade later with Cricket, starting with their advisory board, which they stacked with literary heavyweights, among them the children’s author Lloyd Alexander; Virginia Haviland, the founder of the children’s
book section at the Library of Congress; and the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer. (A story by Mr. Singer, about a cricket who lived behind a stove, inspired the magazine’s name.) The board offered advice and helped the Caruses make inroads among the
librarians and well-educated parents they would target as subscribers.
The couple also drew on the East Coast literary world to build their staff. Marcia Leonard, an editorial assistant and their first hire, was a recent graduate of the publishing course at Radcliffe College. They hired Clifton Fadiman, a former books
editor at The New Yorker, to be Cricket’s senior editor. Mr. Fadiman’s regular radio and television appearances made him one of the few midcentury New York intellectuals to become a household name, and he used his extensive network of friends to
stock the magazine’s pages: He got his friend Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” to contribute to the first issue.
Alongside Mr. Schulz, the first few issues of Cricket featured new work by Mr. Singer and the author and illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, a two-time winner of the Caldecott Medal, as well as reprints of work by T.S. Eliot and Astrid Lindgren, who created
Pippi Longstocking.
Writers of both children’s and adult literature tried to get into the pages of Cricket; Ms. Carus once rejected a submission by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Saroyan. (He took it gracefully and sent in another story, which she accepted.)
Ms. Carus published several anthologies of Cricket stories, and in the early 1990s launched three more titles, aimed at different ages. She ran the magazine out of a book-filled warren of offices above a downtown bar, and later out of a repurposed clock
factory. Around 2000 its headquarters, and its staff of about 100, moved to Chicago, though Ms. Carus, still the editor, decided to stay in LaSalle, with some of her top editors trekking back and forth every few days. The Caruses sold Cricket and its
related titles in 2011; they are still being published.
Despite its fan base, Cricket never made much of a profit, a fact that did not seem to bother Ms. Carus.
“This is an idealistic undertaking,” she told The Baltimore Sun. “We’re not trying to make money. If we were, we’d be in comics and sex manuals.”
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