Rebecca Ross

In a recent meeting of the Fredonia Shakespeare Club, Rebecca Ross presented a paper on Tomie dePaola.

DePaola was born Sept. 15, 1934 into a close-knit Irish and Italian family in Meriden, Conn. He attended the local high school and earned advanced degrees from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, California College of Arts and Crafts, and Lone Mountain College. The latter two are both in San Francisco. He taught at various institutes from 1962 to 1978 when he retired from teaching to concentrate on writing and illustrating children’s book.

He has written and/or illustrated more than 270 books and 25 million have been sold worldwide. Many of his books are autobiographical in nature as he writes about things that have happened in his life. His series of books, featuring Strega Nona, were set in an area where his Italian ancestors lived. The Little Sister was about his sister Maureen’s birth, and his book The Art Lesson was about his first art lesson in first grade, The series about 26 Fairmount Avenue was about the year his family was building a new house. Oliver Button is a Sissy was written about how he was teased for liking dancing and drawing as a child. Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs were written about his grandmother and great-grandmother who was bedridden and lived upstairs.

His first book that he wrote and illustrated was The Dragon of Timlin. Over his career, he won many awards including the Newbery Honor Award, the Caldecott and the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. Children’s literature aids in literacy development, imagination, creativity, social and emotional learning and cultural understanding. The dePaola’s books did all of this and more! His stories, with the air of folktales, at times were set in different cultures and bygone eras but all the characters and situations were easily recognized by the readers. The elements of the human condition are universal. Critics have praised dePaola’s books for their unique style, ability to capture the child’s perspective and moral lessons.

He announced when he was 4 years old that he would write and draw books for children when he grew up and he certainly did do that. He passed March 30, 2020, at the age of 83.