‘The Snowy Day,’ first picture book with black child as hero, marks 50 years

If it had purely been a “cause” book, some argue, “The Snowy Day” would be just a footnote. The fact that children still read it today has to do with the universality of the story and Keats’s stunning collages.

“That’s what struck me: It was gorgeous,” said Laura Ingalls Wilder Award winner Tomie dePaola, who has written or illustrated more than 200 books. “It deserves all the fame and notice it’s going to get.”

Keats’s art has a richness and depth, Christopher Award-winning author and illustrator Jerry Pinkney said, that only increases as you peel away its layers.

“He brought his sensibilities as a painter, his ability to remember his childhood and express it in a way that other kids could connect to, his total love of the city,” said Pinkney, who curated an exhibit in Los Angeles in the 1990s that included Keats’s work. “You take a 32-page picture book — packed into those 32 pages is all of that.”

Keats once attended art classes with Jackson Pollock and was working during the height of abstract expressionism.

“He’s been compared to Edward Hopper: taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary,” said Nick Clark, chief curator for the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., where the exhibit will be on display this year. Collage, Clark suggested, might be a way of using scraps of paper to suggest “life’s detritus.” Clark added that Keats had the ability to take the poverty and squalor he saw as he walked through his neighborhood and recombine them in a way that was beautiful: “So there are these exquisitely rendered reproductions of graffiti. He found a way to capture this other beauty.”

Although the 50th anniversary has been cause for celebration, when “The Snowy Day” was first published some critics questioned whether a Jewish man had the right to tell a story about an African American child.

“Carry that to an extreme, and none of us could write,” Paterson said. “There’s no space for the imagination.”

The controversy was “devastating” to Keats, Pope said. He had grown up in a poor immigrant family and changed his last name from Katz to Keats after years of anti-Semitism. Pope says he asked: “How can you put a color on a child’s experience in the snow?”

Winning the Caldecott Award and receiving fan letters from Hughes and other African American activists helped stem the criticism. “It was such a vindication,” said Regina Hayes, president and publisher of Viking Children’s Books in New York. At the time, full-color printing was very expensive, and most picture books were either black and white, or alternated between black and white and color pages. “It was really a commitment. Everyone [at Viking] was completely aware that this was going to be the first mainstream picture book to feature an African American child as a main character.”

“It holds up the need for everybody to be included,” Pinkney said. “But I think, you know what, the art stands up. And good art gets better. . . . It’s going to stand up 50 years from now. We’re going to celebrate that 100th year.”