Career
It is said that he discovered his vocation on a 1971 summer afternoon, lying on a hammock and drawing. His mother was watching Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the main characters, George and Martha, ultimately became characters in one of his children's books (as two hippopotami). Marshall continued as a children's author until his untimely death in 1992 of a brain tumor. In 1998, George and Martha became the basis for an eponymous animated children's television show.
Marshall was a friend of Maurice Sendak, who mentions him as the "last in the line" of children's writers for whom children's books were a cottage industry. Sendak said that Marshall was "uncommercial to a fault" and, as a consequence, was little recognized by the awards committees. (Marshall won a University of Mississippi Silver Medallion in 1992, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1989.) Sendak said that in Marshall you got "the whole man", who "scolded, gossiped, bitterly reproached, but always loved and forgave" and "made me laugh until I cried." In 2007, the American Library Association posthumously honored Marshall with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his "substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children."
In addition to George and Martha, the lovable hippopotami, James Marshall created dozens of other uniquely appealing characters. He is well known for his Fox series (which he wrote as "Edward Marshall"), as well as the Miss Nelson books (or Miss Viola Swamp, written by Harry Allard), The Stupids (written by Allard), the Cut-ups, and many more. James Marshall had the uncanny ability to elicit wild delight from readers with relatively little text and simple drawings. With only two minute dots for eyes, his illustrated characters are able to express a wide range of emotion, and produce howls of laughter from both children and adults.
Read more about this topic: James Marshall (author)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)