Even the pattern of the pajamas - my great-uncle had pajamas like that. The yellow-print housedress the mom wears - my mother had a housedress like that, too. But I remember seeing Peter, and this kid looked just like me.

“At 4, I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate what I was looking at. exhibition about Keats, opened this fall at the Jewish Museum in New York and will travel to Massachusetts, California and Ohio in 20.Ĭollier, whose book “ Uptown” won the first Ezra Jack Keats award, still remembers his mother, a Head Start teacher, bringing home “The Snowy Day.” “It was the first time I saw a kid that looked like me,” Collier said. “The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats,” the first major U.S. To celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary, Viking has issued a special edition that includes eight pages of supplemental material, including the magazine photos of a little boy that inspired Keats and a fan letter from poet Langston Hughes. “That’s been a wonderful change, even in the lifetime of my children, who are in their 40s now.” “It’s so important for a child to be able to say, ‘There I am in the book,’ ” said Paterson, whose daughters are Chinese and Native American. “The fact that it’s still around - and picture books are like lettuce in the grocery store, they disappear so fast - the fact that it’s still with us is something,” said Newbery and National Book Award winner Katherine Paterson, who is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Writers such as National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, who thanked Keats in his 2007 acceptance speech, and award-winning author/illustrator Bryan Collier have cited “The Snowy Day” as an inspiration. It also was quietly groundbreaking, both as what is widely considered the first picture book to star a black child and in its use of collage, for which Keats won the 1963 Caldecott Medal. “My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.”įirst published 50 years ago, “The Snowy Day” is a gentle story that revels in the wonder of an urban snowfall.

“None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids - except for token blacks in the background,” wrote author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats, who died in 1983. But in 1962, Peter from “The Snowy Day” was something most children in the United States had never seen before: an African American character who was the hero of his own book. Children in snow suits are a common sight during winter.

The snowy day story