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| Joan Walsh Anglund | |
Joan Walsh Anglund, a "prolific children's author who earned the devotion of millions of readers with her sentimental depictions of little ones, their features often reduced to their all-seeing eyes in illustrations that sought to capture the essence of childhood," died March 9, the Washington Post reported. She was 95.
Anglund produced more than 120 books that sold 50 million copies worldwide in multiple languages. Her illustrations "became ubiquitous through their adaptation for greeting cards, calendars, figurines and other collectible merchandise," the Post noted, adding that she had a "signature style in which children's round faces were rendered without mouths or noses. Much like children themselves, they were a tabula rasa, a screen on which young readers could project and try out their own new and unfamiliar emotions."
"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," Anglund once observed. "This may be too why I find myself dressing the children in my books in a timeless manner, 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, and she 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). Her more recent books include Babies Are a Bit of Heaven (2002), Love Is the Best Teacher (2004) and Faith Is a Flower (2006). In addition to illustrating her own works, she provided drawings for The Golden Treasury of Poetry by Louis Untermeyer (1959). Anglund also wrote several volumes of poetry for adults.
"Children are little people who know how to experience the 'now,' " she told the Boston Globe in 1988. "Adults look fore and aft, and pine for what is not."
In a remembrance, Tim Jackson, a family friend who produced the documentary Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem, wrote: "In the film she confides, 'I realize I can’t stay here forever, but I feel that I can. I don’t have any sense of being old and sensible. Because every day the world is so new to me.' She spent 60 idyllic summers with the extended family at her small beach house on Nantucket. Days before she passed she said to her daughter Joy, 'I’m going into the deep, deep waves. I’m going to a homecoming.' "