In 1960, he co-authored his first children’s book, My Dog is Lost, which features a Puerto Rican child who has just arrived in the United States. A random assignment changed his life when he was asked to create a children’s book cover.įor the next several years, Keats illustrated other people’s books and became a respected figure in kid lit. As Keats looked at the wallet carried by his father, he realized it was full of newspaper clippings and other mementos of his own successes.Īs an adult, Keats worked as an illustrator, did a stint as a WPA muralist, worked in comic books, and became a U.S. Keats’ complicated relationship with his father turned tragic when his father died of a sudden heart attack, and he was asked to identify his father’s body at the morgue. Only later did Keats realize his father had bought them all along. But he also gave young Keats tubes of paint-which, he said, had been given to him by starving artists. Keats’s father told his son that artists starved as a waiter in Greenwich Village he often saw eccentric artists down on their luck.

He told Freedman how his mother helped him hide his paintings from his father. Though Freedman remembers Keats’ home as welcoming, his experience was different. As a child, he was shamed by his father for his art. The Snowy Day’s collage style was engaging, but even more extraordinary was the fact that it focused on a black child.

The snowy day book cover