You may not know the name Ursula Nordstrom, but chances are, you know the books she helped bring to fruition, including Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and many more. This upbeat and inspiring biography by Beth Kephart takes us through Nordstrom’s childhood, her years as a transformational editor, and her retirement, “where she lived with Mary Griffith, the woman she loved.” That’s right: The editor with arguably the most influence on the shape of children’s literature over the past century was a queer woman.
The book begins with a description of Nordstrom from one of her own quotes: “a grown-up who never forgot what it was to be a child.” The only child of “glamorous” parents who later divorced, Nordstrom gained an early love of books from her father, and escaped into books when she heard her parents fighting. At boarding school, although she was “a girl who laughed,” she “could also feel alone, and different.”
When college proved too expensive, she took a job in the textbook division at Harper & Brothers, but then moved to the Department of Books for Boys and Girls, first as an assistant, and later as head of the department. It was then up to her to find writers with “the most terrific ideas” and choose the “funny/naughty/scary/true” books that would most appeal. Her favorites were “good books for bad children,” as she liked to say. We see her as head of a busy department, talking with editors, authors, teachers, and parents in search of new talent and ideas. Once she found them, she also helped her authors along, dispensing advice to such luminaries as John Steptoe, Ruth Kraus, Brown, Sendak, and White, and helping to shape their books into the masterpieces that they are.
Importantly, too, when some said certain stories were “too naughty, funny, or scary” for children, Nordstrom asserted “that there are all kinds of children who need all kinds of books”—a reminder that I’m particularly glad Kephart included.
Nordstrom was beloved by her artists and writers, but when she retired, she headed home to Connecticut and Griffith, and reflected fondly on the many “good books for bad children” that she had helped create.
The text is both punchy and poetic, with line breaks that turn it into free verse and keep the story moving. The illustrations from Chloe Bristol are warm and earth-toned, with occasional pops of color and a lively dynamism. Together with Kephart’s (and sometimes Nordstrom’s own) words, they make book editing, not always seen as an action-packed profession, seem exciting. “‘Answer that!’ she’d yell at her assistant/when the phone would ring./’That could be the next Mark Twain.'” Images of many books Nordstrom edited also make their way onto many of the pages.
This is an overdue picture-book biography of a woman who was one of the driving forces in creating children’s literature as we know it today. (She also edited Syd Hoff, Shel Silverstein, Toni Ungerer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Garth Williams, among others.) Young readers should enjoy learning about the story behind many of the other stories they know and love, and may even be inspired to become authors or editors themselves. The book also quietly gives them a rare model of a queer woman who not only has an impactful career, but also grows old with her beloved.
The New York Times said in her obituary that she “[helped] to change children’s books from moralistic works written for adult approval to works directed at the emotions, imaginations and problems of children.” As the Washington Post reflected in a profile of her just a few weeks before the current book’s publication, however, “It is precisely the bypassing of adults that is the purported objection of book banners today.” Nordstrom defied the objections, and children’s literature was better for it. Adult readers as well as young ones would be wise to take heed.
Backmatter includes an Author’s Note with further details about Nordstrom’s life and a short bibliography. Highly recommended.
In Addition: A Queer Legacy
While Good Books for Bad Children doesn’t mention it (which feels appropriate, given its focus and short length), several of the authors Nordstrom mentored were also queer, including Brown, Sendak, and Fitzhugh. Nordstrom also edited I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, by John Donovan (1969), the first young adult novel to clearly show a same-sex relationship. Nordstrom later wrote of it:
I had for years also said that I wished somebody would write a book that would just give a hint that there could be a romantic feeling between two persons of the same sex. It happens to almost everybody when they’re growing up, a crush on a teacher or something, and they outgrow it or they don’t outgrow it.
See “Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book” in the LA Review of Books for more on all this.
Here’s another fun chain of connection: One author whom Nordstrom edited was Charlotte Zolotow, whose William’s Doll (1972) was one of the earliest picture books to show a boy who defied gender norms. (One of the illustrations in Good Books for Bad Children shows its cover.) Zolotow had worked in the adult trade-book division of Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row) until Nordstrom noticed her work and offered her a job in the children’s division. (See Zolotow’s obituary in the New York Times.) Zolotow in turn encouraged her secretary, Fran Manushkin, to write a picture book, Manushkin told KidLit411. While Manushkin’s first submission was rejected by Nordstrom, her second was accepted, and published in 1972. Fast forward to 2020, with many books in between, and Manushkin’s Plenty of Hugs gives us a delightful story of a two-mom family—you may be familiar with it as it’s been in many recent roundups of LGBTQ picture books, and it’s one of my favorites. Nordstrom herself had died in 1988, so her influence on it can only be counted as indirect, but it’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that not only children’s literature in general, but also the genre of LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books in particular, would likely be very different today without her and the authors and editors she nurtured.
