The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats

Keats appears in some of his illustrations. Here he casts himself as János, the poor immigrant violinist at the center of Penny Tunes and Princesses. János, like Keats, struggles but eventually overcomes life’s difficulties through his art.

As a teenager, Keats captured his neighborhood in scenes such as this one, reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings of urban alienation, which he admired and sometimes copied.

Goggles! is Keats’s first truly autobiographical book. The story is set on a fictionalized street, one block from where he lived, but considered dangerous territory. Keats was small and artistic, and was often the target of bullies. In the book, Peter, his dog Willie, and friend Archie, must outwit a gang of bullies in order to keep the discarded motorcycle goggles they have found. A reviewer wrote: “One has to see the glowing brilliance and flow of action on these pages to realize how a great artist can use color and perspective and ground-level views to create suspense and realism. The brooding tenements, flapping washlines, dark alleys, games of sidewalk hopscotch, boyish graffiti on walls—all of these are real and lively, but never depressing, probably because the children themselves are such a joy.”

After Peter’s dog Willie manages to snatch the goggles and escape the big boys, Peter and Archie first seek refuge in their hideout. After assessing the situation, they creep out of their shelter and in this glorious scene, trailed by Willie, they flee for home, no bullies in sight.

Keats considered Apt. 3 to be the most personal book he had ever created. The plot conflates two vivid childhood memories: music floating up from his tenement’s courtyard and an encounter in which he was moved by a blind man’s deep awareness of the world. In the story, Sam and Ben go on a quest to find the source of the haunting music they hear rising above the various tenement noises. The sound is a blind man’s harmonica. Keats’s art for the book is his most painterly and bleakest. In this scene, after Sam and Ben hesitantly enter the blind man’s flat, he enchants them with his music. The artist builds up to this brilliant ending by using mostly dull colors throughout and then shifting from somber browns to glorious purples, a transformation echoed in the ebullient, poetic text: “He played purples and grays and rain and smoke and the sounds of the night. Sam . . . felt that all the sights and sounds and colors from outside had come into the room and were floating around.”

In Dreams color flows out of the windows of a Brooklyn apartment building on a hot summer night. As the inhabitants begin to dream, whatever has darkened their days is dispelled and color suffuses their world.

In The Trip, Louie’s old, familiar neighborhood turns threatening, with overpowering shadows, when the protagonist revisits it with the help of a shoe-box diorama he has fashioned. The Trip was later adapted for the theater with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz of Wicked fame, and the artist’s illustrations were used as the basis for sets and costumes. The musical, which opened in December 1983, a few months after Keats’s death, was later expanded and continues to be performed, under the title Captain Louie.

In this scene we are introduced to Barney the ragman, from whose truck a music box has fallen. As Louie picks it up and is about to put it back on the truck, the music box, which Barney thought was broken, begins to play. The junkman accuses the boy of stealing it and runs after him, eventually catching up with Louie near the house where he lives with his mother, Peg. The larger-than-life Barney is based on a character from Keats’s childhood, a tempestuous religious Jew known as Tzadik, as well as being a self-portrait.

Louie and Susie’s return voyage in their makeshift spacecraft offers a dramatic view of lower Manhattan with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. This incandescent image of the New York skyline is today a moving tribute to the destroyed buildings.

“In The Snowy Day the figure you see walking through the snow is a little abstract shape. I wanted to keep it simple,” said the artist. Keats wanted the book to be “a chunk of life, the sensory experience in word and picture of what it feels like to hear your own body making sounds in the snow.”

In The Snowy Day Keats wanted to evoke the universality of a childhood experience— playing in the snow for the first time—but also the uniqueness of that experience to one particular child. Keats discussed the interplay between these two aspects with his editor as they chose the book’s title. “Annis Duff and I wondered if it should be A Snowy Day or The Snowy Day, and she said [that] experiences of a special kind—although it’s the things a boy does, many, many boys and girls do—it’s a memorable experience for him and that it would be more appropriate to say The Snowy Day rather than A Snowy Day.”

Whistle for Willie introduces us to Peter’s lovable dachshund, named for Keats’s older brother. Over several stories Willie is Peter’s sidekick and constant companion. In this book, the boy, now slightly older than in The Snowy Day, learns how to whistle for the dog.

In the book’s charming finale, Peter, trailed by Willie, heads home from an errand, proudly whistling the whole way. Keats’s friend Charlemae Rollins was especially delighted with Whistle for Willie. A librarian and author who campaigned to end the stereotyped portrayal of black people in children's literature, she wrote to him: “It’s my only bright hope in this ‘Summer of Goldwater’ ”—a reference to the decision by the influential Republican Senator Barry Goldwater to oppose the Civil Rights Act, enacted on July 2, 1964.

In A Letter to Amy the artist uses a range of techniques to capture the mood of a stormy day in the city. The children’s-book critic of The New York Times was captivated: “Keats’s illustrations are something else again. He’s a master storm-maker sending dark clouds scudding across the sky ‘like wild horses,’ ripping the overcast with electric bolts, showing us postered walls, sidewalk hopscotch scribbles, blurred reflections in a puddle in a wild, wonderful light. This man makes a rainy day beautiful with his rainbow colors.”

Hi, Cat! follows Peter and his friend Archie around the neighborhood, trailed by an interfering alley cat. Archie, whom we first met in Goggles!, is now older and more central to the story than Peter. Keats had vivid childhood memories of a neighbor’s feisty cat, a former stray that may have been his model. The neighbor, Mr. Max, had found it in an alley. “Love at first squint. The cat became [his] henchman and a terrible menace to the mice who dared to venture forth in the dark hours of the night,” Keats recalled. “He’s a mazik,” Mr. Max would say of his pet, using the Yiddish term for rascal.

Pet Show! is the seventh and last book featuring Peter. With the emergence in the late 1960s of African-American children’s authors and illustrators whose stories emanated from within the black community, Keats turned his attention to other children in Peter’s neighborhood such as Roberto, the Hispanic protagonist of Dreams (1974), and shy Louie—the white character who is the artist’s stand-in.

This evocative illustration accompanies verses excerpted by Keats from the Tewa poem “Song of the Sky Loom,” which envisions nature as a garment for humanity.

Despite being wounded, John Henry, the folk hero, saves his fellow crew members from an untimely explosion while digging a tunnel through a mountain for the railroad.

Filled with superb collages, Jennie’s Hat is Keats’s first story with a female protagonist. In the book, Jennie longs for a fancy hat but is given a very plain one by her aunt instead. Birds come to the rescue and soon the hat becomes an amazing creation to behold.