I was struck by the fact that I was unable to find biographical information about Richard Scarry online. Perhaps I wasn't looking hard enough. In any case, I went to the "analog" library and looked him up.
He was born in Boston, MA on June 5, 1919. He served in the Army during World War II, acting as art director, editor, writer and illustrator in the Morale Services Section of Allied Forces HQ. He was sent to the North African and Mediterranean region to carry out these duties and one wonders whether that influenced him to write the "Detective CousCous" section of Busy, Busy World (1965). He married in 1949, the same year he illustrated Kate Jackson's Let's Go Fishing. The first book that he wrote and illustrated that I see listed for him was published in 1951.
In Contemporary Authors, vol. 18, they mention that some folks criticized Scarry for what they saw as gender stereotyping. "Scarry suggests that reviewers who assume that an animal dressed in trousers in undoubtedly a male are themselves guilty of sexism. 'My feeling is,' he remarked to Leonore Fleisher of Washington Post Book World,'that if a woman is a truck driver she's going to dress exactly as a man truck driver. She wouldn't wear a dress.'" This is a fine argument, but does not stand up to scrutiny. Every male character he names in the books I've seen wears pants and every female character wears a dress. He gets better by 1976, showing a character wearing a dress performing an oil change on a car in Busiest People Ever. Feminist though I am, I don't think Scarry's depictions were particularly heinous. Though he doesn't challenge the gender assignment of jobs, he shows women as busy contributors to the economy of the community. His oversights were certainly no worse than his contemporaries' and possibly better. They didn't make me feel limited. I identified with whoever I felt like identifying with in his books.
Contemporary Authors goes on to cite a Publisher's Weekly interview in which he said that he used animals as protagonists to avoid racial and gender stereotyping. "Children can identify more closely with pictures of animals than they can with pictures of another child. They see an illustration of a blond girl or a dark-haired boy who they know is somebody other than themselves, and competition creeps in. With imagination- and children all have marvelous imagination -they can easily identify with an anteater who is a painter or a goat who is an Indian or a honey-bear schoolteacher." I think this is one of the reasons that the books have proved popular in so many countries. I certainly found that his drawings lost a lot of their hold on me once the protagonist was changed to a little Euro-American boy. It seemed so insipid compared to the animals. I can't cite the book because it's at my parents' house, but it's one of the Planes, Trains, Boats or Cars books that were released in 1967. Scarry's popularity is attested to not only by the many printings his books have gone into, but by the fact that used copies are snapped up so quickly when they appear at Moe's Books.
Mr. Scarry died of a heart attack in Gstaad, Switzerland on April 30th, 1994. I wonder when he moved to Switzerland and why. I'm just curious about that, it's not that I'm making a value judgment about it. For myself, I know that the political and social situation in this country makes me want to move to Sweden...
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