Alvin Tresselt

Born September 30, 1916 in Passaic, New Jersey
Died July 24, 2000 in Burlington, Vermont


Alvin Tresselt's life and work was a living embodiment of the land of second chances. Born in 1916 in Passaic, New Jersey, he became a leader in a particular style of children's writing as well as sustaining a career as an editor and publisher.

Growing up in New Jersey at a time when the basis of the state motto, "The Garden State" was more obvious, he spent a number of summers on a farm as a child. His love of the land led to daydreaming about becoming a farmer with a herd of cattle.

However, graduating high-school in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, opportunities were constrained. He headed across the river to New York, working a variety of jobs up to the beginning of World War II. He was rejected for military service for health reasons and,, instead spent the war years working in defense plants.

It was really only in 1946, twelve years after finishing school, that his career began to take a discernable direction. The first event of the year was his landing a job at one of the old New York department store icons, B. Altman & Co., working on interior displays.

Also in 1946, Tresselt wrote his first children's book, Rain Drop Splash, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. Tresselt was familiar with the work of Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard and the whole Bank Street College movement. There was a new effort from these folks to create children's stories that were not the traditional morality tale but rather stories that seized on and amplified some aspect of a child's world and related it in a fashion comprehensible to a young child.

This style of writing, frequently referred to as "mood" writing, exults in the rhythm and cadences of language. The stories are often not even stories as traditionally understood. Sometimes there is no protagonist as the focus of the story. Frequently there is little narrative structure or even directionality to the story. They often are more characterized by a cycle of sound and rhythm than by having a beginning, middle and end. In most instances, it is expository writing without a narrative structure.

If this sounds like academic gibberish, it often is in the hands of lesser talents. However, with a Margaret Wise Brown or an Alvin Tresselt, it can produce something more akin to an extended westernized haiku; a little mysterious and out of the ordinary but soothing and relaxing. These are often wonderfully calming stories, excellent for bedtime or calming an overly excited child.

The forward to Tresselt's Caldecott Medal winner, White Snow, Bright Snow, gives you a sense of the melody of his writing. The prologue is in verse form but the main text is in prose though it nudges into poetry territory every now and then.

Softly, gently in the secret night,
Down from the North came the quiet white.
Drifting, sifting, silent flight,
Softly, gently in the secret night.

White snow, bright snow, smooth and deep.
Light snow, night snow, quiet as sleep.
Down, down, without a sound;
Down, down to the frozen ground.

Covering roads and hiding fences,
Sifting in cracks and filling up trenches.
Millions of snowflakes, tiny and light,
Softly, gently, in the secret night.

You can get a sense of his prose style from this excerpt from How Far is Far?

"How far is far?" asked the little boy.

"As far as the end of your nose," said his mother, and she kissed the end of his nose.

"As far as you can walk until you get tired. As far away as the other side of the world. Even as far away as the first star that shines when the sky grows dark."

"That's a lot to think about," said the little boy, and he went out to dig a hole.

In the case of Tresselt, this sense of mood is supplemented with a dose of information - it isn't all fluff. While Tresselt was inspired by the work of Brown and Weisgard, he drew upon his own experiences and enthusiasms to inform his stories. In the case of Rain Drop Splash and for many of the books that were to follow, this meant writing stories related to nature, the cycle of life and ecology. In his first book, Tresselt follows a single rain drop from a mud puddle through the water cycle, ultimately to the ocean.

As an aside, it is interesting to note just how many ecology/conservation stories were being produced in these years, not as a movement, and not even as message books. In fact, that is part of what makes them so wonderful. You are not clunkingly hit over the head with a "Nature is Good" message, but rather, you enjoy a story in which that is the inescapable conclusion without it ever being presented as such. Just in this period, way before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring for adults, you have Janice May Udry with A Tree is Nice, Bill Peet with Farewell to Shady Glade, Virginia Lee Burton with The Little House and I am sure there are others. I wonder how many conservationists of the sixties were inspired by exposure to these tales.

Following the popular and critical reception of Rain Drop Splash, Tresselt worked with Roger Duvoisin to produce White Snow, Bright Snow in 1947 winning that year's Caldecott Medal for the illustrations. This was the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration with Duvoisin. Of the fifty-three books Tresselt wrote over his lifetime, Duvoisin illustrated eighteen of them.

With his critical and popular reputation founded on these two books, Tresselt continued writing primarily nature based "mood" books over the next fifteen years including Sun Up, Follow the Wind, Autumn Harvest and Wake Up, Farm!

As trend-setting as his books were, they became widely, and often less adeptly, emulated. One consequence was that by the sixties, some began to comment on a surfeit of these type of books and to criticize his continuing focus on nature and "mood" books. In 1964, Tresselt began a second chapter of his writing with a long series of retellings of folktales, primarily stories from Japan. However the first in this sequence, and ever since one of the most popular, was the retelling of an old Ukrainian folktale, The Mitten recounting the adventures and misadventures of an increasing crowd of forest animals seeking refuge from the winter cold in the ever expanding mitten dropped by one small boy. This folktale has proven to be enduringly popular in the US with numerous subsequent author/illustrators trying their hand at the retelling; most recently Jan Brett's beautifully illustrated version.

All during the period that he was writing children's stories, Tresselt also held a regular job, first at B. Altman, ultimately moving into their in-house advertising, and then leaving B. Altman and moving into publishing. In 1952 he became the managing editor of the Parent's Institute's children's magazine, Humpty Dumpty. In 1965 he became the editor and then executive editor of Parent's Magazine Press. After leaving the Press in 1974 he became dean of faculty at the Institute of Children's Literature in Redding Ridge, Connecticut and was involved in an officer capacity in a variety of children's literature organizations.

In 1978, Tresselt and Duvoisin teamed up for a final book, What Did You Leave Behind? a story for children emphasizing the importance of observation. While this was Tresselt's final original book, in the eighties and nineties, he revisited nine of his earlier books, revising the text in some cases and in others also releasing them with new illustrations.

After a long and accomplished life, a series of professional roles, a fruitful and abundant career as a children's author with two distinct bodies of work, Tresselt, man of second chances, passed away July 24, 2000.

Picture Books

Hide and Seek Fog by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin Recommended

The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Yaroslava Mills Suggested

The Gift of the Tree by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Henri Sorensen Recommendation

White Snow, Bright Snow by Alvin R. Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin Recommended

Bibliography

Rain Drop Splash by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard 1946
White Snow, Bright Snow by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1947
Johnny Maple-Leaf by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1948
The Wind and Peter by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Gary MacKenzie 1948
Bonnie Bess, the Weathervane Horse by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Marylin Hafner 1949
Sun Up by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1949
The Little Lost Squirrel by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard 1950
Follow the Wind by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1950
Hi, Mister Robin! by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1950
Autumn Harvest by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1951
The Rabbit Story by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard 1952
Follow the Road by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1953
A Day with Daddy by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Helen Heller 1953
I Saw the Sea Come In by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1954
Wake up, Farm! by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1955
Wake up, City! by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1957
The Frog in the Well by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1958
The Smallest Elephant in the World by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Milton Glaser 1959
Timothy Robbins Climbs the Mountain by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1960
(With Wilbur Wheaton) An Elephant Is Not a Cat by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Tom Vroman 1962
Under the Trees and through the Grass by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1962
How Far Is Far? by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Ward Brackett 1964
The Mitten: An Old Ukrainian Folktale by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Yaroslava Mills 1964
A Thousand Lights and Fireflies by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by John Moodie 1965
Hide and Seek Fog by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1965
The World in the Candy Egg by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1967
The Old Man and the Tiger by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Albert Aquino 1967
The Tears of the Dragon by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki 1967
The Fox Who Traveled by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Nancy Sears 1968
(With Nancy Cleaver) The Legend of the Willow Plate by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Joseph Low 1968
The Crane Maiden by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki 1968
Helpful Mr. Bear by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Kozo Kakimoto 1968
Ma Lien and the Magic Brush by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Kei Wakana 1968
It's Time Now! by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1969
The Witch's Magic Cloth by Alvin Tresselt 1969
How Rabbit Tricked His Friends by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Yasuo Segawa 1969
The Rolling Rice Ball by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Saburo Watanabe 1969
The Fisherman under the Sea by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Chihiro Iwasaki 1969
The Beaver Pond by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1970
Eleven Hungry Cats by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Noboru Baba 1970
A Sparrow's Magic by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Fuyuji Yamanaka 1970
Gengoroh and the Thunder God by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Yasuo Segawa 1970
The Land of Lost Buttons by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Kayako Nishimaki 1970
The Hare and the Bear and Other Stories by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Yoshiharu Suzuki 1971
Ogre and His Bride by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Shosuke Fukuda 1971
Lum Fu and the Golden Mountain by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Daihacki Ohta 1971
The Little Mouse Who Tarried by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Kozo Kakimoto 1971
Wonder-Fish from the Sea by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Irmgard Lucht 1971
Stories from the Bible by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Lynd Ward 1971
The Dead Tree by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Charles Robinson 1972
The Little Green Man by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Maurice Kenelski 1972
The Nutcracker by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Seiichi Horiuchi 1974
What Did You Leave Behind? by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin 1978