I recently picked up Philip Nel’s 2012 dual biography of ­children’s literature luminaries, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed ­Child­ren’s Literature, and was immediately riveted. Nel did amazing due diligence: eighty interviews! Nearly six hundred (unobtrusive) footnotes! Research at three dozen archives! All his work paid off handsomely.

Krauss (1901–1993) and Johnson (1906–1975) published seventy-five books between them, many of which became bestsellers and instant classics, in their creative heyday from the 1940s to the 1960s. While I have read and admired their wonderful work for ages, the best part of the book for me was the intimate portrait of a loving marriage and creative ­partnership. They lived a joyous, artistic, and purposeful life together.

David Crockett Leisk (pen name: Crockett Johnson, known to all as Dave) came from a working-class Methodist family in Queens. Ruth Krauss was born into an upper-crust Jewish family in Baltimore. Early on, I learned she went to the same summer camp in Denmark, Maine, as I did. It was founded on lofty Ethical Culture principles that sought to create a more humane society by recognizing the unique talents of every person. Although she was mischievous at camp, Krauss called her time there “transformative” and credited it with stimulating her ­creativity. (My memories of Camp Walden are more about surreptitiously smoking ciggies and shoplifting in a nearby town…but that’s just me.)

Both ended their formal education in their late teens in favor of their artistic pursuits, though Krauss eventually graduated from Parsons School of Design in her late twenties. By the mid-1930s, they each were living la vie bohème in Greenwich Village. They had serious love affairs and brief marriages and both were now divorced. He was the art editor and cartoonist at New Masses, a Marxist politics and culture magazine. They met around 1940 and, according to Krauss: “That was it!” They married in 1943.

By all accounts he was quiet, modest, wry, and gentle while she was out­going, volatile, irreverent, and impetuous. He was seriously nocturnal while she was diurnal. He was tall and burly; she was rather petite. Despite their differences, they were united in their artistic ­perfectionism. Their best work is ­seemingly simple with messages that run deep — messages of ­creativity, self-reliance, courage, feminism, even world peace. They never had children of their own, but their kinship with and respect for children shines brightly in everything they created.

In the early 1940s, they moved to Rowayton, a congenial, left-leaning community of artists and writers on the Connecticut coast. It was close enough to New York City that they could easily return for work and fun. Johnson began work on Barnaby, a comic strip featuring a curious five-year-old child and his fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley. The text and illustrations are spare but contain important messages about the worth and imagination of children. Krauss had been working seriously in the field of anthropology, and her interest in children led her directly into writing children’s books. In 1944, her first children’s title, A Good Man and His Good Wife, was published by Harper. Her editor was the legendary Ursula ­Nordstrom. A year later, Harper published The Carrot Seed. It’s the story of a little boy who stands his ground against his parents and all the adults in his life. It was written by Krauss and illustrated by Johnson and has never gone out of print in nearly eighty years.

Krauss’s lyrical texts often incorporated actual statements from very young kids, which she assembled by hanging out with them. Perhaps her most celebrated text was A Hole Is to Dig: A First Book of First Definitions, published in 1952. As is customary, Krauss submitted the text to Nordstrom, who began a search for someone to illustrate it. Several big-name illustrators turned the project down, claiming it was too abstract and hard to illustrate. When Nordstrom approached a twenty-three-year-old window dresser and little-known children’s book illustrator named Maurice Sendak, the deal was sealed. Krauss insisted that Sendak receive fifty percent of the royalties, a generous gesture that was uncommon if not unheard-of at the time.

A Hole Is to Dig put forward the radical notion that kids could define the world on their own terms. It was an enormous success and launched Sendak’s career. After that, Krauss and Sendak were frequent collaborators, and Krauss and Johnson became ­mentors and parental figures for Sendak, who for years spent many weekends with them in Rowayton. While the Cold War raged on, the FBI was surveilling Johnson and many other activists in the progressive town. The local nursery school, where Krauss spent time with kids, was even known as the “Little Red Schoolhouse.”

Nel’s biography is chock-full of juicy tidbits, and here’s a good one: it amused me to no end to learn that Krauss always referred to A Hole Is to Dig as A Hole in the Head! It was also fun to learn that, years later, Johnson suggested the word rumpus to Sendak when he was working on Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak referred to Max, the protagonist of the book, as “the love child of me, Ruth, and Dave.”

In 1952, Johnson published Who’s Upside Down?, the first children’s book he had both written and illustrated. In 1950, The Happy Day, a collaboration between Krauss and illustrator­ Marc Simont, won a Caldecott Honor. In 1954, A Very Special House, a ­Krauss-Sendak collaboration, won a second one.

It was fascinating for me, a longtime book publisher, to read about the occasional vicious disputes, most often over money, between Krauss and Nordstrom, especially as Krauss became more successful. It resulted, inevitably, in Krauss taking some of her books to other publishers. ­During this period, Krauss and Johnson worked together on several books (How to Make an Earthquake in 1954 and Is This You? in 1955) but also published with other collaborators. Then, in 1955, ­Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon became a runaway success. The story of a young child (not unlike Barnaby in appearance) creating his own reality struck a chord. It showed that you could determine your own destiny with imagination, which the purple crayon symbolized. Through all sorts of ­adventures, Harold was safe and sound as long as he kept his wits and his purple crayon.

The increasingly volatile collaboration between Krauss and Sendak ended by the late 1950s, and Krauss turned her attention to Remy Charlip. (­Sendak was interviewed repeatedly by Nel, so I kept in mind the adage about history being told by survivors.) ­Johnson ended the Barnaby strip in 1962, and his last Harold book, Harold’s ABC, was published in 1963. Krauss began to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara (whom she referred to as “my teach”), and her avant-garde poetry was published in journals including ­Harper’s. She was an aspiring playwright, and her work was produced way off-Broadway. She also mentored poets and children’s book authors, including Mary Ann ­Hoberman. Another amusing tidbit: due to her small size and ebullience, Krauss seemed younger than her age. In the early 1970s, she changed her birthdate on the “official record,” making herself ten years younger.

Johnson became more interested in philosophical, even existential stories. He published books in that vein in the early 1960s — Castles in the Sand and The Emperor’s Gifts — and was disappointed that they did not find large audiences. Not surprisingly, he was very involved in protesting the Vietnam War. By the mid-1960s, he’d enthusiastically started painting, with a focus on large, abstract, geometric forms. Tragically, in 1975, Johnson, a lifetime smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer and died several months later. He was sixty-eight.

Krauss never recovered from her loss. She lived another eighteen years and could barely hear Johnson’s name without falling to pieces. As his heir and executor, she curated his legacy, including television and theatrical productions of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Having written over forty books for children, in 1987 she published her last one, Big and Little. She died in 1993 at the age of ninety-one. Her ashes mingled with Johnson’s when they were scattered in Long Island Sound. Krauss left most of their estate to “charitable organizations which are dedicated to meeting the needs of homeless children in the United States,” stipulating only that the organizations “have no particular religious affiliation.” Throughout their lives together, Krauss and Johnson kept their wits, their purple crayons, their ideals — and their profound and abiding love for each other.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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