Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House celebrates its 70th anniversary this year as a picture book classic. Originally published in 1942, the story of a little house that witnesses a city grow up around it won the Caldecott Award for illustration and was later adapted into an Disney animated short in 1952. Best known for her book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel --- another story in which industrialization takes a role --- Burton started her career as an illustrator, working for newspapers and illustrating the books of others before she finally begin designing books of her own.
The daughter of a poet and a professor, Burton begin her life outside of Boston before the family moved to California for her mother’s health. Always interested in art, she won a scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Her commute to art school was two hours by train, ferry boat and cable car. “I mention this,” she writes about her own life, “because I used those long commuting hours to train myself in making quick sketches from life and from memory of my unaware fellow passengers.” Her book Maybelle the Cable Car --- reprinted using art retrieved from the San Francisco Public Library --- is influenced by her drawings and experiences on these journeys. These commutes also gave her the practice she needed for a later job as a sketcher for a newspaper.
Burton writes that, though Choo Choo --- about a locomotive who runs away from her everyday duties --- is her first published work, she still considers Jonnifer Lint, her first manuscript about a piece of dust, to be her first book. “I and my friends thought it was very clever but thirteen publishers disagreed with us and when I finally got the manuscript back and read it to Aris, age three and a half he went to sleep before I could even finish it. That taught me a lesson and from then on I worked with and for my audience, my own children. I would tell them the story over and over, watching their reaction and adjusting to their interest or lack of interest…the same with the drawings. Children are very frank critics.”
Burton’s son Aris, now a sculptor, provides the foreword to the 70th-anniversary edition of The Little House, which is packaged with an audio CD of the story, while Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel was dedicated to her son Michael. Burton even used Michael as the model for the little boy, who helps Mike and the steam shovel (named Mary Ann) dig a cellar in one day.
With the exception of her book Calico the Wonder Horse, all of Burton’s ideas and drawings, however stylized, came from life. She illustrated her books first, substituting pictures for words whenever possible, and would only write the texts last “when I can put it off no longer.” Burton was notorious for her strong decisions involving the design and appearance of her books, whether it was the placement of the text in the pictures, the patterned endpapers she designed for many of her books, or her use of various different types of colors and mediums to convey the mood of a book. “Each new book is a new experience, not only in subject material and research, but also in learning a new medium and technique for the drawings,” she said.
Though she died in 1968, Burton’s books for children remain in print. Her work as a designer --- she founded The Folly Cove Designers, focused on refining the ability to see elements of design in the world around us --- can be found in museums throughout the United States. Her books, often about the machines that share the world around us, are as stylish and appealing as the day they were printed, imbuing everyday objects with a personality and purpose that places them at the center of her stories rather than the periphery.
What’s your favorite book by Virginia Lee Burton? Why do you think her work withstands the test of time?
Sarah A. Wood, reviewer for teenreads.com and kidsreads.com since 2003, is a lifetime reader and writer. She refuses to accept that there are people who don't like to read and stubbornly believes this is only because they have not met the right book yet.
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