https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/joan-walsh-anglund-dead/2021/03/19/95ec8df0-8852-11eb-bfdf-4d36dab83a6d_story.html
Excerpt:
...“I think perhaps I am trying to get down to the essence of a child — not drawing just a particular, realistic child, but instead I think I’m trying to capture the ‘feeling’ of all children — of childhood itself, perhaps,” Ms. Anglund
observed in reflections quoted in the reference guide “Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults.”
“This may be too why I find myself dressing the children in my books in a timeless manner,” she continued, “not really in any definite ‘period’ in time — but always with a vague sense of nostalgia.”
Her first book, “A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You,” was published in 1958 after her husband discovered the manuscript and submitted it to the Harcourt publishing house in New York City, where the family lived at the time. A transplanted Midwesterner,
Ms. Anglund was consumed by loneliness and despaired that she might never find a companion in the city.
"I would look at the huge buildings around me and imagine that behind every window was someone who had the potential to be a friend,” she once said, according to an obituary that appeared in Publishers Weekly.
Her ruminations on friendship became the germ of her book, which Ellen Lewis Buell, a reviewer of children’s literature for the New York Times, described as “small, pretty” and “deceptively slight-looking.” For any child who has ever felt left
out, she wrote, Ms. Anglund’s “theme — that friendship is where you find it — can be a very reassuring experience.”
Ms. Anglund went on to produce dozens more books, finding particular success in the early years of her career with “Love Is a Special Way of Feeling” (1960), “Christmas Is a Time of Giving” (1961) and “Spring Is a New Beginning” (1963).
She displayed particular skill in defining emotions in ways that children could understand — explaining, for instance, that love is the “good way we feel when we talk to someone and they want to listen and don’t tell us to go away and be quiet.”
If some readers dismissed her writing as saccharine, other found it pure and true...
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