Little Bear

The books in the E. H. Minarik series about the Little Bear are practically classics of American children’s literature. The series of six collections, the first appeared in 1957, is addressed to beginning readers and consists of simple stories from the life of a mother bear and her Little Bear (as well as a father bear, a sea captain who is always absent).

The illustrator of all the books in the series was Maurice Sendak, perhaps one of the most famous illustrators, because it is not for nothing that he collected the entire collection of the most outstanding awards in the field of children’s literature: the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Astrid Lindgren Award, the Caldecott Medal and many lower-ranking awards. However, all this will be after the publication of the legendary book “Where the Wild Things Are” in 1963.

The book has illustrations on every page. They take up half the page, and below, under the picture, there is text, all of this is enclosed in a beautiful frame with a plant ornament. Each picture depicts a scene from the life of the mother and the Little Bear, as well as some minor characters. Sendak is very laconic in this book: all the pictures are done in gray-brown tones, there is nothing superfluous on them, but the heroes (anthropomorphic bears) and interiors with wooden furniture and fireplaces are carefully depicted, thanks to which “Little Bear” is compared with a series of works by Laura Ingalls Wilder about a small house on the prairie, describing the simple traditional life of the inhabitants, descendants of the first settlers, of the North American continent of the century before last.