His roots go back at least six generations in the Shetlands - rocky, mostly treeless islands halfway between Scotland and Norway, governed by the latter until the late fifteenth century. He was born in New York City, on October 20, 1906. And before Crockett Johnson, there was David Johnson Leisk. He talked to journalists, but, in his wry, laconic way, he typically said very little about his life before Barnaby.īut before Barnaby, there was Crockett Johnson. When the first collection of the strip was published the following year, newspapers and magazines sought interviews with the strip’s creator, Crockett Johnson. O’Malley - part confidence man, part fairy godfather - met five-year-old Barnaby, and the comics pages had a new classic.
He died in 1975.Features Before Barnaby: Crockett Johnson Grows Up and Turns LeftĪdapted from Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).Ĭushlamochree! In April 1942, Mr. Johnson finished out his career as a fine artist, painting over 100 large, vivid canvases of geometric forms. He married author Ruth Krauss in the early ’40s and lived on the shore of Long Island Sound, where Maurice Sendak would “apprentice” in his early twenties. The Magic Beach was published by Front Street in 2005. Harold, the protagonist of his best known series, began his many journeys in Harold and the Purple Crayon in 1955.Ī previously unpublished manuscript was recently found. Johnson’s first book, Who’s Upside Down?, was published in 1952.
“I draw people without hair because it’s so much easier! Besides, to me, people with hair look funny.”īefore he became a well-known writer and illustrator of children’s books, he created some of the most beloved comic strip characters of the 20th century. Like Barnaby and Harold, his most famous characters, Johnson was bald. He studied art at Cooper Union and New York University. Crockett was a childhood nickname and so he chose it for a pen name.
Crockett Johnson was born David Johnson Leisk on October 20, 1906, in New York City.
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