Tibor Gergely

Tibor Gergely (August 3, 1900 – January 13, 1978) was a Hungarian-American artist best known for his illustration of popular children's picture books. His work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

Biography Gergely was born Tibor Grünstein in Budapest in 1900 into a middle-class Jewish family. With the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, he fled Hungary for Vienna, where his social circle included other Jewish exiles such as the Hungarian Red Army commander Jenő Landler and the communist politician József Révai. He studied art briefly in Vienna and drew newspaper caricatures there before immigrating to the United States in 1939, where he settled in New York City.

Career Gergely's early works were influenced by Paul Cézanne and Cubism. His best work is collected in The Great Big Book of Bedtime Stories. He became a U.S. citizen in 1948.

Death Gergely died in 1978, in New York.

As of 2001, Tootle was the all-time third best-selling hardcover children's book in English, and Scuffy the Tugboat was the eighth all-time bestseller.