 |
I was born in 1915 in Paris, France. My parents were Spanish and, at that time, my father was illustrator and artist
reporter for L'Illustration. My regular schooling, which was far from spectacular, began in Barcelona, Spain. In those days, I always looked forward to my yearly bouts with grippe because they
kept me from school for a week or ten days. It was during one of those bouts that I learned to write by repeatedly tracing the text of a picture book called El Ginesillo.
My father was my first art teacher. Following a visit to New York after World War I, he decided it would be good for my sisters and
me to have a blend of the Old World values and the New World feeling of freedom. During the following years we divided our time between Europe and the United States. While in Paris, I studied art at
the Académie Julian, Académie Ranson, and the André Lhote School. In 1935, aged nineteen, I came to the United States, attended the New York National Academy of Design, served three years in the
army, married Sara Dalton, and had a son, Marc Dalton Simont.
Picture Books
A children's picture book comes to life after the publisher has paid an advance for a text, chosen and illustrator, and joined the
two together at the contract ceremony. With the advance money in his pocket, and ready to embark into what will (surely) be the best work he has ever done, the illustrator is in high spirits. For the
writer, the work is finished, which puts him into a post-partum depression, made worse by the prospect of having an illustrator finish the job to his own taste. (The writer's situation is not unlike
that of someone obliged to give up a beloved pet. Once it is out of his hands, all he can do is hope the new owner will love it and treat it well.) In the best scenarios, the illustrator will love
the story, adopt it as his own, and with his pictures give an added dimension to the book.
It's different when the writer and illustrator are the same person. When Reiko Sassa told me the story of how her family adopted a
stray dog, I said it sounded like a natural for a kid's book. She wrote the story and it was rejected in Japan. I then tried to write it and it was rejected in the United States. Perhaps the plot of
a family adopting a lovable stray dog had run its course, and the reason it had sounded so much like a children's book was because we had heard it so many times before; still, I felt that its
innocent simplicity was also its strength and decided to give it a third "at bat." As writer and illustrator I worked for a harmony of words and picture, and in the end I found I needed very little
text. •
|
About the Author:
Marc Simont illustrated his first children's book in 1939, and since then
has provided the pictures for nearly 100 titles, including the 1949 Caldecott Honor Book The Happy Day, by Ruth Krauss, and Janice May Udry's A Tree is Nice, winner of the 1957 Caldecott
Medal. He was honored as the 1997 Illustrator of the Year by the Professional Association of Illustrators in his native Catalonia. Mr. Simont makes his home in West Cornwall,
Connecticut, with his wife, Sara, their two dogs, and a cat.
Books written and/or illustrated by Marc Simont include:
The Stray Dogs (HarperCollins Children's Books, 2001)
The Goose That Almost Got Cooked (Scholastic, 1997)
Playing Right Field written by Willy Welch (Scholastic, 2000)
My Brother Ant written by Betsy Byars (Viking Children's Books, 1999)
Ant Plays Bear written by Betsy Byars (Viking Children's Books, 1997)
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
Meet the Author/Illustrator Archives
|