Sadly, the day before, Benjamin died in the street of a heart attack. There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won. My silent admirer and supplier, he had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work. Unable to attend art school despite having received three scholarships, Ezra worked to help support his family and took art classes when he could. Among the jobs he held were mural painter with the Works Progress Administration WPA and comic book illustrator, most notably at Fawcett Publications, illustrating backgrounds for the Captain Marvel comic strip.
Ezra went into the Army in , and spent the remainder of World War II designing camouflage patterns. After the war, in , he legally changed his name to Ezra Jack Keats, in reaction to the anti-Semitism of the time. It was his own experience of discrimination that deepened his sympathy and understanding for those who suffered similar hardships.
Ezra was determined to study painting in Europe, and in he spent one very productive season in Paris. Many of his French paintings were later exhibited in this country, and he continued to paint and exhibit throughout his life. After returning to New York, he focused on earning a living as a commercial artist.
One of his cover illustrations for a novel was on display in a Fifth Avenue bookstore, where it was spotted by the editorial director of Crowell Publishing, Elizabeth Riley. Jubilant for Sure, written by Elizabeth Hubbard Lansing, was set in the mountains of Kentucky, a long way from the Brooklyn streets or Paris ateliers.
My Dog is Lost! From the beginning, Ezra cast minority children as his central characters. Two years later, Ezra was invited to write and illustrate a book of his own. After years of illustrating books written by others, Keats found a voice of his own through Peter. The techniques that give The Snowy Day its unique look — collage with cutouts of patterned paper fabric and oilcloth; handmade stamps; spatterings of India ink with a toothbrush — were methods Keats had never used before.
Keats skillfully weaves into his plots a sense of the dilemmas and even dangers his protagonists face. In The Snowy Day Peter, about four years old, yearns to join a snowball fight but learns he is too small when a stray snowball knocks him down. Later, he learns how to assume the role of older brother Peter's Chair , to stand up to his friends when he invites a girl to his birthday party A Letter to Amy , and to avoid the violence of a gang of older boys Goggles! One of Keats' signature story elements is that the children in his books are consistently challenged with real problems that are recognizable to young readers; in solving them, the characters learn and mature.
In a later series of four books beginning with Louie , Keats introduces a silent, lonely and brooding child who responds to a puppet during a puppet show with a joyous Hello!
Louie lives largely in his imagination, constructing a diorama in a shoebox and escaping into it in The Trip , and building a spaceship out of detritus and traveling among the planets in Regards to the Man in the Moon. But he is resilient enough to search for a candidate for a stepfather, and find one, in Louie's Search , and to learn to stand up to taunts from other children. Keats has said that Louie is the character he most related to, having felt invisible and unloved as a child and escaping through his creative pursuits.
My Dog is Lost , co-authored by Pat Cherr, was published in and was Keats' first attempt at authoring a children's book. Keats was innovative in his use of minority children as central characters.
In the two years that followed, Keats worked on a book featuring a little boy named Peter. Peter was inspired by photos Keats had clipped from Life magazine in None of the manuscripts I'd been illustrating featured any black kids--except for token blacks in the background.
My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I'd begun to illustrate children's books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book. The book featuring Peter, The Snowy Day , received the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished picture book for children in Peter appears in six more books growing from a small boy in The Snowy Day to adolescence in Pet Show.
In , he was awarded The University of Southern Mississippi Medallion for outstanding contributions in the field of children's literature.
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