Where Someone Loved Him Best of All
Ursula Nordstrom, Maurice Sendak, and the writing of a great sentence
In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Mac wrote about a new biography of the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom.
Here is a gift link to Mac’s review.
Below, Jon and Mac talk a bit more about Nordstrom (children’s literature’s #1 Ursula) and get into a story behind a single, crucial sentence in Where the Wild Things Are.
As usual, this conversation was conducted over text message.
MAC: Hi Jon.
JON: Hi Mac.
MAC: So one of the web headlines for this review is “Without Her, These Beloved Classics Might Never Have Been Published.” I was happy to see that. (Everybody might know this already but when you write a review for a newspaper you don’t write the headline).
JON: The few times I’ve written things for newspapers, I’ve forgotten the headline thing.
MAC: Wait, do you send it in with a headline???
JON: No, and I always am like “oh crap I made them do it cause I forgot!”
But it’s just policy. I guess.
MAC: Well this headline got to a question I was thinking about a lot while writing this piece but didn’t really end up discussing directly. There were all these huge forces in the middle of the last century that contributed to a “golden age” of great children’s books (and especially picture books). So, if Ursula Nordstrom had never existed, would the books she published simply haven been published by some other editor?
The answer I arrived at was no. Like, I don’t think we’d get Where the Wild Things Are without Ursula Nordstrom.
JON: Mac, for those who subscribe to this but may not have the DEPTH of knowledge that you (and I! I for sure also) have on Ursula Nordstrom, could we (together, with our knowledge) flash a short greatest hits list of the books she ushered into the world, editorially?
MAC: Well, to quote myself, in the review I just wrote:
“Ursula Nordstrom edited an astonishing share of the 20th century’s best and most beloved children’s books: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy, The Giving Tree, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and works by John Steptoe, Tomi Ungerer, Syd Hoff, Ruth Krauss and Gwendolyn Brooks.”
I’ll just add, especially for the Looking at Picture Books reader, that she published Donald Crews’s first book too.
JON: Sheesh. The range there is wild, too. It’s not just a certain kind of picture book. It’s not just picture books.
How does the same person get a useful long view of a piece of work like Goodnight Moon and also give constructive notes to E.B. White about his novel?
MAC: Maybe another way to ask that is, what made Ursula Nordstrom great at her job?
JON: Hahaha yes I suppose another way is.
MAC: Well…