Randall Jarrell's 100th anniversary today (critic/poet)

[leno...@yahoo.com]

Born in 1914 in Nashville, Tennessee, he died in
an accident(?) in 1965.

He has a 43-page entry in volume 111 of the
Children's Literature Review encyclopedias.

His retelling of "Snow White" was illustrated by
Nancy Ekholm Burkert and won a 1973 Caldecott Honor.
You can see a few pictures here:

http://bookimagecollective.blogspot.com/2011/04/snow-white-illustrations-by-nancy.html

Juvenile books illustrated by Maurice Sendak are:

The Animal Family
The Bat-Poet
Fly By Night
The Juniper Tree, and other tales from Grimm / selected
by Lore Segal and Maurice Sendak ; translated by Lore
Segal, with four tales translated by Randall Jarrell

Illustrated by Garth Williams:

The Gingerbread Rabbit

Illustrated by Margot Zemach:

The Fisherman and his wife : a tale from the brothers Grimm

From the New York Review of Books, today:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2014/may/06/randall-jarrell-maurice-sendak-children-books/

By Katherine Rundell.

Excerpt:

...For those who know him as a hardboiled reviewer, a
kind of Philip Marlowe of literary criticism, it would
seem an anomaly that he wrote five books for children.
For those who know his poetry, though, it might not be
surprising at all. His later work especially drew often
on images of childhood--as in "The Lost Children," which
begins "Two little girls, one fair, one dark/One alive,
one dead, are running hand in hand." The adult poetry
speaks of a desire for a lost innocence. This becomes a
block in Jarrell's work for children; great children's
literature has no truck with the idea that children are
pure, as the target audience is very aware that they are
not. Children, as children know best, can be nasty,
brutish, and short. J. M. Barrie knew it; the closing
sentence to Peter Pan makes it clear: "and thus it will
go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and
heartless." Sendak, the illustrator of several of Jarrell's
books, knew it; Where the Wild Things Are is as chaotic
as it is gleeful. And Jarrell's stories are best when
they are at their most dark and strange...

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/randall-jarrell
(brief bio, with photo)

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/jarrell/about.htm
(another bio)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/randall-jarrell
(about his work)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Jarrell

https://www.facebook.com/events/392999897502004/?ref=5
(tribute)

https://ure.uncg.edu/prod/cweekly/2014/04/15/randalljarrellcentennial/
(about the Randall Jarrell Centennial Symposium, from April,
at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro)

https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/event_detail/2166
(more, from February)

And, in Katha Pollitt's 1991 award-winning essay, "Why
We Read: Canon to the Right of Me...," she quotes Jarrell
at length. I can't give a direct link, but you'll find her
entire essay easily enough, here:

https://www.google.com/#q=%22why+we+read+canon%22

The quoted passage appears in the last third. (One message
of Pollitt's is that even college students can't be expected
to remember any classic literature they're FORCED to read
if they never learned to like reading in general - and
weren't allowed much of a reading range in the first place.)



WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

(Contributor) Five Young American Poets, New Directions, 1940.
Blood for a Stranger (poems), Harcourt, 1942.
Little Friend, Little Friend (poems), Dial, 1945.
Losses (poems), Harcourt, 1948.
(Translator) Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome , Schocken, 1948.

The Seven League Crutches (poems), Harcourt, 1951.
Poetry and the Age (criticism), Knopf, 1953, reprinted, Noonday, 1972.
Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (novel), Knopf, 1954.
Selected Poems, Knopf, 1955.
(Editor) The Anchor Book of Stories, Doubleday-Anchor, 1958.
Uncollected Poems, [Cincinnati], 1958.

The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems and Translations (also see below), Atheneum, 1960.
(Editor) The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday, 1961.
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays and Fables, Atheneum, 1962.
(Translator) Ludwig Bechstein, The Rabbit Catcher and Other Fairy Tales of Ludwig Bechstein, Macmillan, 1962.
(Translator and author of introduction) Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Golden Bird and Other Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Macmillan, 1962.
(Editor) Rudyard Kipling, The English in England, Doubleday, 1963.
(Editor) R. Kipling, In the Vernacular: The English in India, Doubleday, 1963.
(Editor) Six Russian Short Novels, Doubleday, 1963.
The Gingerbread Rabbit (juvenile), illustrations by Garth Williams, Macmillan, 1963.
Selected Poems Including the Woman at the Washington Zoo, Macmillan, 1964.
The Bat-Poet (juvenile), illustrations by Maurice Sendak, Macmillan, 1964.
(Translator) Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters, produced at Morosco Theatre, 1964.
The Lost World: New Poems, Macmillan, 1965, published with an appreciation by Robert Lowell, Collier Books, 1966.
The Animal Family, illustrations by Sendak, Pantheon, 1965.
Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, edited by Lowell, Pete Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, Farrar, Straus, 1968.
Complete Poems, Farrar, Straus, 1968, reprinted, 1980.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker, David Lewis, 1969.
The Third Book of Criticism, Farrar, Straus, 1969.

The Achievement of Jarrell: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems, edited by Frederick J. Hoffman, Scott, Foresman, 1970.
Jerome: The Biography of a Poem, illustrations by Albrecht Duerer, Grossman, 1971.
(Translator) Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm, Farrar, Straus, 1972.
(Translator) Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, edited by Lore Segal and Sendak, Farrar, Straus, 1973.
Fly by Night (juvenile), illustrations by Sendak, Farrar, Straus, 1976.
(Translator) Goethe's Faust, Part I, Farrar, Straus, 1976.
A Bat Is Born, illustrations by John Schoenherr, Doubleday, 1978.
Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964, Farrar, Straus, 1979.

(Translator) Jakob Grimm, The Fisherman and His Wife, Farrar, Straus, 1980.
Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, edited by wife, Mary Jarrell, and Stuart Wright, Houghton, 1985.

Selected Poems, edited by William H. Pritchard, Michael Di Capua Books/Farrar, Straus, 1990.
No Other Book: Selected Essays, edited by Brad Leithauser, HarperCollins, 1995.


Lenona.