Gertrude Stein's Children's Book is Pretty Much What Slate Expected

Children's literature and poetry bibliophiles can agree on at least one thing: Gertrude Stein's children's book The World is Round is predictably genius. Via Slate:

Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of the Bank Street College of Education, was sick of children’s books. She didn’t want didactic moral tales that told kids what to do, or mythological flights of fancy. Instead, she wanted children’s stories that actually showed children how to experience the world. In 1921, Mitchell published the Here and Now Story Book, stories for children written in direct language that helped readers learn through observation and discovery. Instead of just writing, “Henry looked up,” she believed, a story should say, “Henry threw back his head and looked up.” Children, Mitchell thought, should go through the story in real time, performing the same muscular actions as the storybook kids––monkey read, monkey do.

In 1938, before she’d become famous for Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown was the first editor at Young Scott Books, a new publishing house that wanted to print the type of books Mitchell and Bank Street favored. Young Scott solicited manuscripts from writers of grown-up literature, hoping their picks might have a suitable kids’ book in them. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck rejected the offer. But Gertrude Stein responded not only that she wanted to do it, but that she “had already nearly completed” the perfect book for the project.

By 1938, Stein had established herself as a writer grappling with psychological immediacy. Like Mitchell, Stein was drawn to William James’ ideas about stream of consciousness, and when she studied at Radcliffe, she practiced automatic writing under James’ tutelage. Stein was also already obsessed with education and children’s thought processes. In works such as the play Reread Another (written in 1921) and the essay “An Elucidation” (1923), Stein simultaneously adopts the roles of both lecturer and faux-naïf pupil. So when Young Scott reached out with the offer to write explicitly for children, Stein leapt at the chance, and in 1938, Young Scott published The World Is Round.

Indeed it is. Read on at Slate.