William Steig

Steig was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1907, and spent his childhood in the Bronx. His father, an Austrian immigrant and a house painter by trade, dabbled in fine arts in his spare time, as did his mother. As a child, Steig was inspired by his creative surroundings with an intense interest in painting and was given his first lessons by his older brother, Irwin, who was also a professional artist. In addition to painting, his childhood imagination was captured by the romance of many other creative works that crossed his path: Grimm's fairy tales, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlie Chaplin movies, Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Englebert Humperdinck's opera Hansel and Gretel, and especially Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio.

As a young man, Steig found an outlet for his talent by creating cartoons for the high school newspaper. Throughout his youth he also excelled at athletics, and during college he was a member of the All-American Water Polo Team. After high school graduation, Steig spent two years at City College, three years at the National Academy, and five days at the Yale School of Fine Arts before dropping out. Before Steig started writing children's books, he was well established as a noted cartoonist in The New Yorker. During his early days as a freelance artist, he supplemented his income with work in advertising, although he intensely disliked it.

Writing books for children was a career Steig began relatively late in life, and it came about by chance rather than intention. In 1967, Bob Kraus, a fellow cartoonist at The New Yorker, was in the process of organizing Windmill Books, an imprint for Harper & Row. Kraus suggested that Steig try writing and illustrating a book for a young audience. The result was Steig's letter-puzzle book entitled C D B!, published in 1968. The process of creating children's books proved a short learning curve for the inventive Steig. With Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (1969), he joined the ranks of the best, winning the Caldecott Medal.

In 1972, Steig published his first children's novel, Dominic, the story of a dog hero. Steig followed it up a year later with another longer story for children, The Real Thief, about a goose called Gawain on an exiled journey. Another long tale is the Newbery Honor Book Abel's Island, in which a rich and idle Edwardian mouse, dressed in a smoking jacket, is stranded on an island after a storm. A crossover title for Steig was the 1995 Grown-ups Get to Do All the Driving, which Steig intended for adults but which his publishers packaged for both adults and children.

"I enjoyed my childhood," he told Angell in The New Yorker. "I think I like kids more than the average man does. I can relax with them, more than I can among adults . . . Children are genuine . . . I like to think that I've kept a little innocence. Probably I'm too dumb to do anything else."

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