Posted: Aug. 26, 2007

This is Kevin Henkes as a child, as he described himself in a recent speech:

"I love books. I love to read them, and I love to look at them. Examine them. Smell them. Run my fingers over the paper. I'm huddled in the corner behind the big red chair (in his living room), with a stack of new library books. I feel complete. Happy. I feel as if nothing can disturb me. I'm enveloped. It's just me and my books behind the big red chair."

This is Kevin Henkes as an adult:

Still immersed in children's books, enveloped in every detail and aspect of them, he's complete, he's happy - and he's a towering figure in children's literature today.

A child in Racine, an adult in Madison, he has more than three dozen books to his credit as an author and illustrator, and they have been big successes both critically and commercially. Henkes has created picture books for preschoolers, stories for grade-schoolers and novels for teens - and succeeded hugely at each. He is also a first-rate scholar of the entire field of children's books.

As the opening words of a recent New York Times review of his new picture book, "A Good Day," put it: "It should be said: Kevin Henkes is a genius."

Or as a faculty member at the University of Kentucky told a reporter for the Lexington ( Ky.) Herald-Leader, when Henkes visited there in March, he is "the Mick Jagger of children's literature."

Or as this fact demonstrates: Henkes is the only person since 1980 who has won both a Caldecott Medal for best illustrated book ("Kitten's First Full Moon," a picture book for preschoolers, in 2005) and a top award in the Newbery competition for best children's book (a Newbery Honor, equivalent to second place, for "Olive's Ocean," a novel, in 2004). Those are the two most prestigious competitions in American children's books.

Or as the sales totals demonstrate: "Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse" and "Lilly's Big Day," aimed at grade-schoolers and featuring a strong-willed mouse with a spunky, flamboyant character, have sold more than a million copies combined, according to Henkes' publisher, Greenwillow Books, which is part of HarperCollins Publishers.

At 46, Henkes is consistent with the child he described, someone whose ideal day is spent working on books and art in a warm, elegant house filled with books and art, where he lives with his wife, who is an artist, and their two children, who, at 12 and 9, routinely begin days at 6:30 a.m. with a half hour of reading a book out loud with their father.

A process

Details matter to Henkes.

In "A Good Day," the pictures are on the right side and the words on the bottom of the left for the "bad" days in the first half of the book. But on the "good days" pages in the second half, the pictures are on the left and the words on the top of the right.

So what?

"It matters," Henkes says. Every element in the total presentation is important. The paper. The shape of the page. The typeface. The exact words (only 118 in the entire book, in this case). A child might or might not get a feeling that there is a difference between the bad days and the good days through the positioning on the pages, but to Henkes the difference "adds to the strength of the meaning of the words and the pictures."

"The more absolutely right-on the structure of a book is - it makes everything else feel right," Henkes says.

Those who don't know any better might look at a book such as "A Good Day" and wonder what Henkes did the rest of the day. It looks so easy.

In reality, it was three years from the birth of the idea to publication; about a year of that was Henkes' labor. He says he would wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about things such as the expression to put on the fox's face and how the fox should hold its head, and he would spend all day wrestling with getting it drawn right.

Small objects matter to Henkes.

A silver fork for a child, unearthed in a garden, sparked a novel for adolescents. A homemade snow globe made using a baby food jar was a key to creation of the award-winning "Olive's Ocean."

Henkes keeps small objects like those on a shelf near the desk where he writes in the studio he created in the attic of his home on the near west side of Madison. They fuel his imagination.

One day, he found a three-pronged maple seed - not your usual two-pronged type. For months, he kept it on the shelf. It became part of the inspiration of a novel for teens to be published next spring.

From childhood

Nancy Elsmo remembers Henkes the child: She was working with children's books at the Racine Public Library and he would come in with his family, including his parents and four siblings.

The children were "oh-so-polite and wonderful to work with, so receptive. Very responsible and just beautifully brought up," recalls Elsmo. She led the brother who liked sports to baseball books and so on. Kevin went for the illustrated children's books.

Elsmo says she worked at the library 30 years until retiring and saw many children who were wonderful readers. But she never saw anyone like Henkes. He wanted to know everything about the books. He took art classes at the Wustum Museum of Fine Arts to learn how to be an illustrator.

In 1979, after graduating from St. Catherine's High School, Henkes enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He immediately headed for the Cooperative Children's Book Center, a repository on the campus of children's books and expertise on children's books.

Ginny Moore Kruse, now retired as director of the center, said it was "pretty amazing" for a freshman to ask for an appointment with her. Henkes told her he wanted to create children's books and showed her a portfolio of his art.

"It was really clear he was very good, very talented," she said. He began taking courses on all the aspects of the field - design, typography, paper selection.

At 19, he decided to go to Manhattan to sell his first book. He had never been to New York, much less pitched a publishing idea.

He focused on Greenwillow as his first choice for a publisher. Susan Hirschmann, the editor and a person of major influence in children's books, agreed to see him.

"I marvel that I had the courage to do it," Henkes says. To just go there and ask for a contract, "That's sort of crazy. But I really believed it."

Hirschman vividly recalls her first glimpse of him.

"He looked like about 12. . . . I said, 'Why did your mother let you come to New York alone?' because that's how he looked," she says.

"He showed me his portfolio and then he showed me the dummy of his first book, 'All Alone.' . . . It was absolutely in control. He knew what he was doing. It had a beginning, it had a middle, it had an end. The pacing was superb, there wasn't an extra word in it."

She bought it.

"Then he dropped out of college to do the book," Hirschmann says. "I thought, my God, what have I done? It's not a favor to this kid because he'll starve not finishing college. . . . I felt so guilty. I tried very hard to convince him to go back to school. He said, no, he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a children's book author. He was going to devote himself to his books. Like everything else, he knew what he was doing."

The book was a huge, immediate success when it was published in 1981? Nope - this isn't a fairy tale. The book did OK commercially, as did the next several from Henkes, but they were not bestsellers. Yet Hirschmann and Greenwillow stuck with Henkes, and he kept developing.

In 1986, "A Weekend With Wendell," his first book using mice as the main characters, was published. The mice were, of course, really kids - vivid, spunky ones, with nearly universal joys and worries. They were a hit with both the target audience of early grade school kids and adults.

More mouse books followed, leading to "Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse" in 1996, a big hit that assured Henkes' financial standing.

Hirschmann says that following the first Lilly book, Henkes was in a position where "he could have turned out a Lilly book every year - just cranked them out."

"It was of absolutely no interest to him," she says. "He never takes the easy way out."

There were 10 years until the next Lilly book was published. Henkes says now that he assumes there will be another one, but he hasn't had an idea for it yet. That means it won't be published for at least another several years.

Rather, Henkes has continued to explore and follow the ideas that come to his head. "Kitten's First Full Moon," which won the Caldecott Medal, was drawn in black and white, an unusual choice that drew praise from critics.

He says that he just wants to keep doing what he's been doing - creating, writing, illustrating with meticulous care. He recently finished a novel for teens, to be published next spring, "Bird Lake Moon." He is also finishing a picture book for very young children, to be called "Old Bear" and to be published in fall 2008.

Work generally finds him in his home studio, an attic area converted into a roomy, well-lit space. He writes and draws by hand - no computers involved. He writes the first draft of his novels in spiral notebooks and types the final draft on a typewriter his wife purchased when she was in college. Henkes owns a computer, but he doesn't use e-mail - "It just seems like it would add more work to my life" - and he prefers the classic tools of creating children's literature.

He prefers being at home to being most anywhere else. Henkes did a national author tour after "Lilly's Big Day" came out in 2006 but declined to do one when "A Good Day" was published. He said he'd rather be at home. The comfort he feels in the beautiful, older home where he lives with his wife, Laura Dronzek, and their two children is almost palpable in both what he says and what he has written. In a recent lecture, he called the house on Madison's west side, about a mile from Camp Randall Stadium, "everything I've ever wanted in a home," and he says he doesn't foresee moving away from Madison.

That talk, the annual Arbuthnot Lecture of the Association for Library Service to Children, an arm of the American Library Association, is a prestigious event among children's book specialists. It is considered a major honor to give the lecture. The location varies from year to year - this year it was in Kentucky.

Henkes' theme: The role of home in children's books.

Homes mean a lot to Henkes, and he believes they mean a lot to children in general. Henkes compared how different children's books, not only his own, handled the concept of home. He described books as offering a home to a child, a home where they can grow and be nourished.

"It seems as though books can provide the same basic things a house can: Protection. Safety. Comfort," he said.

He said that the picture books he loved as a child had in common "a gentle touch, and genuine beauty with substance to match it."

That is a description that applies to many of the books Henkes has created. He clearly takes the thinking processes of his readers seriously.

In "Olive's Ocean," the main character, a Madison girl visiting her grandmother on Cape Cod, is coming to terms with aging, death and a budding sense of romance. His popular mouse characters, like the brassy Lilly and the worrying Wemberly, speak to the insecurities and transitions in the lives of grade-schoolers. And Henkes views the picture book animals in "A Good Day" as representative of a preschooler's senses of having an identity and a place in the world, of being loved and protected.

Kruse says, "He's a master at using metaphor and symbols and having a deeper, more profound theme. . . . He really has remarkable understanding of a child and a child's internal self."

Virginia Duncan, Henkes' current editor at Greenwillow, says a book such as "A Good Day" can look simple. But, she says, "Something that seems that simple is incredibly complex. He's a really master of it. . . . To me, I think that book has everything you need to know about life, I really do. . . . It says, if you persevere, things will turn out and it will be a combination of luck and love and perseverance and talent and skill, and in the end everything will be fine. It's an incredibly optimistic book."

But Henkes does not see a child's life as easy and all-cheery.

In his Caldecott acceptance speech about "Kitten's First Full Moon," Henkes said, "Kitten, of course, is a child. She is myopic. She is curious. She is persistent. She wants and she wants and she wants. She makes mistakes. She misunderstands. She gets confused. She is scared. She is also a symbol, a symbol that says: Childhood is anything but easy."

In a 2002 speech at UW, Henkes said, "Making it out of childhood, making it through to the other side, is a journey hard-fought."

He said children take steps to test what lies ahead in the maze that ends in adulthood.

"This searching is what I like to explore in my novels for children," he said. "All my main characters feel as if they are puzzles yet to be completed, or that part of them hasn't happened yet. They are on the verge of expecting something new. They are vulnerable. And they, most often, work undercover, keeping their thoughts and desires and feelings under wraps."

Asked if there are lessons in his books, he responded, "I don't even think about that." All he wants is a good story, "a good book experience" for a child. That means both picture and text. He wants kids to identify with the characters.

Hirschman says that in her view of Henkes' books, "The lesson, if there is one, is honesty."

"He doesn't bend truth, he develops characters as fully drawn," she said. "They act the way they really would in situations. Never anything phony or sentimental or over-cute or false. It's just honest. That's why his books appeal to people - people recognize themselves in the characters."

Henkes says the best way to have children turn out to be good readers is to read to them a lot, starting at the earliest ages. He says he started reading to his children while they were still in the womb. He continues to be the voracious reader he was as a child, including serious fiction for adults as well as books for kids. And he has an enormous grasp of children's books of all kinds, going back many years.

"He's such a reader," says Kruse. "I can't keep up with him."

She adds, "One of the things he has chosen to do is to learn about the history of children's literature. . . . He knows what his work is part of. He understands who the great book artists and writers for children were in the past."

As Henkes shows a visitor around his studio, he stops to look at a postcard lying in view. It shows a painting of a girl looking out a window.

He is intrigued with images such as this. He can just stand there and think about this girl - who she might have been, what she might be seeing out the window. Maybe she'll show up in a future story.

If so, he'll invent a full life and character for her, take this one image and build it up until he feels like he knows this girl so well that he can tell her story.

He says there's no instruction manual for building a story.

"How this process works is beyond me," he says. "But somehow it does."