From: lhendr at unm.edu <lhendr>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 18:16:38 -0600 (MDT)

It's hard to choose -- I loved the flying saucer one, too! But having just been through Caldecott-Newbery (which for me as for UN in 1957 was Caldecott-Newbery, not Newbery?ldecott), I laughed out loud over passages in her letter to Sendak, pages 980.

"The Newbery Medal lady was not good, I thought. She spoke for three hours, or maybe it was four, on how she came to write _War and Peace_ and _Moby Dick_, all of Jane Austen, and so forth. With sound effects and emotion. But to get to me, I had a new dress which I loved madly, lavender lace which sounds either too young or too old for me but which really was, the sales lady assured me, `just right.'"

Then later in the same letter after telling how she did not wear her glasses and "couldn't _see_ any of the people who came up to me and said I looked nice, and probably it was the same person just doing it over and over to cheer me up, some relative probably. Because I've just seen the photographs of the official group. Oh God...."

In another letter (is it allowed to have more than one "favorite?"), also to Sendak, she wrote (p. 148, 1961): "You wrote, `It would be wonderful to want to believe in God. The aimlessness of living is too insane.' That is the creative artist--a penalty of the creative artist--wanting to make order out of chaos. The rest of us plain people just accept disorder (if we even recognize it) and get a bang out of our five beautiful senses, if we're lucky."

Linnea Hendrickson Lhendr at unm.edu
Received on Mon 17 Aug 1998 07:16:38 PM CDT