All about Bill Martin Jr. & Eric Carle

No one would dispute that Bill Martin and Eric Carle have a direct link to the minds of young children. Their classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, as well as the works they have created separately - Bill Martin’s Sounds of Language, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar - are testaments to their ability to enter a child’s world.

But as children, both Martin and Carle had trouble coping with school. In Martin’s case, these troubles stopped him from learning to read. “I couldn't really read until I turned twenty,” he says. “But when I got to college” - no entrance exams were required at Emporia State University, Kansas at the time - “I wanted to be a writer.” One beloved teacher there gave him the encouragement he needed to pursue his dream. “If you're going to be a writer, you have to be a reader,” he told Martin. Bill Martin not only became a reader, a writer, and a poet, but earned his doctoral degree in early childhood education as well.

Watch Bill Martin explain how he wrote brown bear

Eric Carle, who was born in the United States, moved with his parents back to their native Germany at six years old. Carle sees a clear distinction between his first American classroom - “a sun-filled room, colorful paints, large sheets of paper,” - and his schoolroom in Stuttgart - “narrow windows, hard pencils.” He soon found that his creative needs would not be fulfilled at school and learned - painfully - that to express himself would lead to corporal punishment. “For the next ten years, I hated school.”

The Brown Bear series represented a way for both author and illustrator to inspire in children that sense of wonder they were discouraged from feeling. “Bill’s approach awakened me in a longing to reach back to that sun-filled classroom in Syracuse,” says Carle. Martin adds, “Our books are a way of giving back to children what we wished for ourselves.”