Trends in Caldecott Winning Books
In undertaking this project, I chose to research the winners of the prestigious Caldecott Award in the hopes of discovering a pattern or trend that may determine what makes a great children’s picture book. What I did find has been even more interesting than what I had hoped to find. First, however, let me begin with a little background information about the award and the procedures for choosing a winner.
During the 1920’s special attention began to be shown to children’s literature, with the advent of entire sections of bookstores and libraries being dedicated to children. At the 1921 meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), Frederic Melcher, the president of R. R. Bowker Publishing Company, suggested the creation of the Newbery Award for excellence in children’s literature. In 1937, Melcher suggested the adoption of an award for excellence in illustration of children’s literature, to be named after Randolph Caldecott. Frederic Melcher and his family sponsor the awards, in the form of medals, every year.
Randolph Caldecott, born in Chester, in Cheshire England in 1846, is known as the father of the picture book genre because he was the first to illustrate stories for children in which the pictures told a story in addition to the story told by the text. Among his most famous works are Hey Diddle Diddle, The Queen of Hearts, and Sing a Song of Sixpence.
Unlike the Newbery Award, in which the author is honored by the award, the Caldecott Medal is awarded to the "artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year. The award shall go to the artist, who must be a citizen of the United States, whether or not he be the author of the text." (Peltola 153) The complete terms of the Caldecott award can be located today on the ALA website (www.ala.org).
All of the Medal winning books claim the title of "most distinguished book for children." But what distinguishes these books from the other books published in the United States during the respective preceding year? Each year the Association for Library Service for Children (ALSC) elects seven members and a chairperson to be on the committee for selecting the Caldecott book. The remaining seven members of the 15 member committee are appointed by the elected chairperson. In the course of the year, each member may nominate six books to be considered for the award, thus, up to 90 books may be considered each year for the award, if each member chooses six different books. The committee members are to consider the following six items in determining the excellence of the books that they nominate: interpretation of the theme or concept, accuracy of presentation, clarity and organization of information, development of plot, delineation of character, delineation of setting and appropriateness of style. It is also important to note that a "picture book for children is one that essentially provides the child with a visual experience" and "for which children are a potential audience." Children are defined as "up to and including fourteen."
After the winning book has been chosen at the Mid-winter ALA conference, the committee decides whether to award and how many to award honor medals. When this has been decided, the discussion and voting commence again for each honor book. Thus, the items receiving the honor medal may be just as deserving of the honor as the one which wins the Caldecott Medal itself. However, for the sake of brevity, for this project, I have only looked at the Medal winners, choosing to save the honor books for further study.
To date, 62 Caldecott Medal winners have been named. As I have perused each of these books, I have hoped to find some patterns within the books in an attempt to discover certain trends in what makes these picture books "the best." The only thing that I have found to be consistent throughout all of the books is the great imagination held within each of them.
The first thing that I looked at was a list of statistical patterns. As an aspiring children’s librarian, I was interested in which illustrators and publishing companies published more of the winning books. There were only six illustrators who earned the award more than once. Marcia Brown leads these elite few with three award winning books, in 1955, 1962, and 1983. Robert McClosky (1942, 1958), Barbara Cooney (1959, 1980), Nonny Hogrogian (1966, 1972), Leo and Diane Dillon (1976, 1977), and Chris VanAllsburg (1982, 1986) each earned two. From looking at the illustrators, it is also interesting to note that 37 awards went to men, 19 went to women and six went to dual illustrators.
In the interest of deciding how to best provide a wide variety of "excellent" books for children, I created a list of publishing companies who published the award winning books. My findings were that Houghton Mifflin published seven Caldecott award winners, and Viking Press published six. Charles Scribners published five; Harcourt Brace and Macmillan each published four. Doubleday published three, and one from their Junior Books division. Puffin Books and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux each published three. Six other companies each published two, with the remaining14 each publishing only one award winner.
The other three statistical categories that I chose to look at proved more difficult to pin down than I originally thought. I was hoping to find possible patterns by looking at the subject material within the books, but there was so much overlapping that it was difficult to choose subjects. For instance, Peter Spier’s book Noah’s Ark (1978) could be classified as either an animal book or a religious one.
Struck by the number of multicultural stories that I read during this project, I looked closer at the stories from other countries and discovered that almost half of the books can be directly tied to a specific country of origin or setting. The very first two Caldecott winners, the only two awarded in the 1930’s clued me in to this trend because the first, Animals of the Bible, chosen by a unanimous vote, was followed by Mei Li, a story about the Chinese New Year Fair. From the very beginning, the Caldecott awards were open to education of and sharing between different cultures.
Another place that I looked for patterns was in the art forms used to create the award-winning pictures. This was the hardest to tie down, but what I discovered was that there was no pattern of a certain form of art being chosen more often. Many of the artists used watercolors for their pictures, but more often than not, this medium was mixed with another art form, such as lithograph pencil, pen and brush, gouache, woodcut, etc. Each book had a unique combination of art that distinguished it from all of the other award-winners.
My final step in analyzing these outstanding books was to look at the books within each decade and try to recognize a pattern or a series of patterns. As I mentioned before, limiting the subjects was difficult because of the variety of subjects or themes within each book. However, I did notice some subject themes by looking at each decade.
The 1930’s were mentioned before as containing only two books, the awarding of the Medal beginning in 1938. These two books, discussed above, set the tempo of multicultural awareness within the Caldecott winners.
The 1940’s were an interesting decade in which there seemed to be an underlying theme of simplicity, especially in nature and perspectives. This decade contains works that combine American history with the country life, landscapes, children and seasons. It is interesting to note that the last two winners of the 1940’s were both books about snow: White Snow, Bright Snow, about how townspeople prepare for a snowstorm, and The Big Snow about animals in the wild preparing for the winter’s first big storm.
The 1950’s were packed with retellings of old stories such as Cinderella (1955) and Frog Went A-Courting (1956), stories about traditions such as the Easter tradition of The Egg Tree (1951), and stories about friendship such as the now classic Madeline’s Rescue (1954).
The 1960’s was one of the most unique decades because it lacked any cohesive trend. The first two winners were cultural stories about Christmas, followed by an Indian fable. 1963 brought us The Snowy Day, the third story about snow, this time as a child experiences the day after a snowfall. The historical significance of this book is that it is the first picture book to depict an African-American child without any reference to his race—he is just a child. The next few books of this decade are pure imagination. Where the Wild Things Are (1964) is a classic of children’s literature today because of the imaginative pictures. Drummer Hoff (1968) was the only Caldecott winner with a subject of war, with a story about firing a cannon and military ranking. However, the pictures are bright, and the rhythm of the words is fun. The final picture shows the cannon that was fired as the center of a wildlife area with birds nesting and spiders spinning on it.
The 1970’s were a conglomeration of multicultural folklore with the African just-so stories of the Spider Man in A Story, A Story (1971) and Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (1976). The Native American culture makes an appearance in Arrow to the Sun (1975) and The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses (1979).
The 1980’s were also a jumble of different books. So much so that I was unable to fit any of them into a single category for discussion. The simple pictures in Fables (1981) and Owl Moon (1988) contrast with the ornate framed paintings of St. George and the Dragon (1985) and the newspaper photograph style of The Glorious Flight (1984).
This decade, the 1990’s, has introduced some of the most creative of the Caldecott winners. The advent of computer technology has begun to allow bookmaking to be more than just text and pictures. For example, take a look at Black and White (1991). The four stories (or is it one?) in this book create an interesting puzzle for the reader. Tuesday (1992) dazzles the reader with popular culture. Smoky Night (1995) and Golem (1997) challenge the standards of what information should be shared with children as they discuss the Los Angeles riots and the Jewish Blood Lie respectively. It is also worth noting that Officer Buckle and Gloria (a story about partnership and safety rules) followed Smoky Night in 1996, while 1998 brought a beautiful adaptation of the classic story Rapunzel to follow the darkness of Golem. This year’s winner, Snowflake Bentley, uses woodcuts and watercolor to illustrate the biography of William Bentley, the first person to scientifically study snow. This is the fourth Caldecott winner about snow.
I believe that the Caldecott Medal winners provide a good starting point for anyone interested in beginning to look at children’s literature because it offers a wide variety of subjects, authors, illustrators, and art forms. As the "most distinguished picture books published in the United States," they both provide us with a standard of excellence which we can then apply to other picture books and allow us a child’s eye view of the diversity which makes this country great.
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