Robert Kraus

Robert Kraus (June 21, 1925 – August 7, 2001) was an American children's author illustrator, cartoonist and publisher. His successful career began early at the New Yorker Magazine, producing hundreds of cartoons and nearly two dozen covers for the magazine over 15 years. Afterwards, he pivoted his career to children's literature, writing and illustrating over 100 children’s books and publishing even more as the founder of publishing house Windmill Books (later an imprint of Simon & Schuster). His body of work is best remembered for depicting animal heroes who always try their best and never give up, which were ideals important to him at an early age.

Biography

Personal Robert Kraus was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1925 to parents Jack, who was in the real estate business, and Esther (Rosen) Kraus. His mother nurtured lessons in him that appear as important themes in Kraus's later written work in the children’s literature genre. He graduated from Milwaukee’s Layton School of Art in 1942 and the Art Students League of New York in 1945.

Early career At age 10, Kraus won a cartoon contest from his local paper the Milwaukee Journal. By age 12, he was hired by that same journal to contribute a weekly cartoon entitled "Public Nuisances." At age 16, he made his first cartoon sale to The New Yorker, which was the most prestigious platform for cartoon prints in the nation at the time He continued both his education and freelance work at the Arts Student League of Manhattan, NY until he became a full-time employee at the New Yorker on contract. He utilized his extensive network of creators from the New Yorker to team up with illustrators like William Steig and Charles Addams. are among the University of Minnesota's Children's Literature and Art Collections.

Professor Paul Fry has used one of Kraus's lesser works, Tony the Tow Truck, tongue-in-cheek to teach a popular English course at Yale, Introduction to the Theory of Literature, using its hundred-word text to illustrate topics such as Hermeneutics, Semiotics, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity.

Windmill Books publishing company Tapping his friendships with other New Yorker artists, Kraus launched a small publishing company, Windmill Books in 1965, publishing The Chas. Addams Mother Goose, and William Steig's Roland the Minstrel Pig, followed by Steig's Caldecott Medal-winning Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. The prestige of Windmill even attracted renowned painter Jacob Lawrence, whose Harriet and the Promised Land (with verse by Kraus) became the first children's book reviewed in the Art section of the New York Times and was recently featured in the Lawrence retrospective at the Guggenheim. Kraus soon quit the New Yorker to run Windmill full-time, as publisher, and wrote and illustrated books for Windmill as well as for Scholastic and other publishers. Windmill artists included Fred Gwynne (the actor), Edna Eicke, Robert Byrd, Hans Kraus (no relation), VIP (Virgil Partch) and Mischa Richter. Windmill published a set of Norman Rockwell covers with original backstories (which Kraus wrote in consultation with Rockwell) as The Norman Rockwell Storybook and with filmmaker Robert Flaherty produced a children's book version of Flaherty's Nanook of the North. Windmill also pioneered "board" and "bathtub" books that doubled as toys for very small children, and dabbled in pop culture with its Elvis calendar and Encyclopedia Galactica.

In spite of its flirtations with the mass market, in the end Windmill Books proved to be more of a succès d'estime than anything else. The company struggled through legal difficulties with its distributor and was forced to sign over to Simon & Schuster in the 1980s. Rabbit and Skunk and the Big Fight Carla Stevens Scholastic 1964 Rabbit and Skunk and Spooks Carla Stevens Scholastic 1967 Cleveland Amory's Animail Cleveland Amory Dutton 1976

The Silver Dandelion Juniper The First Robin

Good Night, Little One Good Night, Little ABC