Animals Are Us: Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature; Celebrating the Peter J. Solomon Collection

figure 4. Garth Williams. Frontispiece: the Little family meets
Stuart, from Stuart Little.
the creation of a class for juvenilia, “Juv,” within its library
classification system. They form a bridge to literacy. And they
can be mind-numbingly dull; in 1954, John Hersey published
an article to this effect. 14 In the wake of this critique, Theodor
Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) accepted the challenge of creating
an irresistible beginner children’s book utilizing 225 different
words. Seuss expanded this number to 236, and in The Cat in
the Hat (1957; cat. no. 39), he created a literary, educational,
and commercial phenomenon. With its subversive theme of a
mischievous cat who disrupts the otherwise mundane day of
two children left at home to their own devices—no helicopter
parents here—the book launched an extraordinarily successful
imprint, Random House’s Beginner Books. For decades,
this book enjoyed “beloved” status, but has been excoriated
recently for its subliminal racist imagery. 15 The Cat in the Hat
joins several other “classics” in the exhibition that have come
under scrutiny for racial insensitivity, and these important new
perspectives in academic circles indicate that children’s books
are, indeed, instrumental in raising issues of social awareness.
Two other revered, though controversial, books have
been rehabilitated after similarly drawing increased scholarly
attention. Recent critical assessment of Joel Chandler Harris’s
Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1895; cat. no. 33) is wildly
mixed, ranging from adulation to vitriolic condemnation. 16
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar offer a penetrating
analysis of Uncle Remus in their recent anthology of African
American folktales. 17 Some consider these adaptations, based
on tales handed down orally by enslaved Africans, to be
revolutionary in their use of dialect and animal personages.
Most likely these stories originated in African “trickster”
tales, such as those centered on Anansi the Spider, whereby
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