Iconic Authors Who Also Wrote A Children’s Book Too
Most of these titles were written in conjunction with her son, Slade, whose childhood musings formed the basis of The Big Box and The Book of Mean People.
The story is told through the eyes of four-year-old TJ, who plays ball with friends on his Harlem block and runs errands for his neighbors.
The Widow and the Parrot, in which a widow inherits her brother’s house after he passes away. She travels there to collect her inheritance only to find a peculiar parrot named James.
Chike and the River, which tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy who longs to cross the Niger River to a city called Asaba.
Since the 1980s, she’s published picture books aiming to help children face real-life problems with titles like Martha’s New Daddy and Freddie’s First Night Away. Steel’s most recent kids’ series is about her chihuahua, Minnie, and her adventures.
Printed on pink pages and blue ink (which Stein insisted upon), the book introduces its young readers to themes of identity and individuality with quirky, elliptical lines like “And which little girl am I am I the little girl named Rose which little girl named Rose.”
King’s main contribution to the world of children’s literature is Charlie the Choo Choo, which he wrote under the pseudonym Beryl Evans. The title character is a sentient train with a life of his own.
“My mother says that when Mrs. Rowley is mean, which is generally the case, it is really because she is just unhappy, and who could blame her with a husband like that . . . She says this is really the only reason people are ever mean–they have something hurting inside of them, a claw of unhappiness scratching at their hearts, and it hurts them so much that sometimes they have to push it right out of their mouths to scratch someone else, just to give themselves a rest, a moment of relief.”
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