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Eric Carle.

Article Excerpt
In 1952, just before his twenty-third birthday, Eric Carle returned to the United States with a portfolio under his arm and forty dollars in his pocket. Fifty years later, in November 2002, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art opened its doors to an admiring public. Between these two landmark events lay half a century dedicated to creating pictures and stories that are known and loved by children all over the world.

Eric Carle was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929. He has cherished memories of a joyful childhood there, and particularly of his first school experience. He often speaks of the sense of happiness he felt in that sun-filled American schoolroom, with large sheets of paper and fat brushes and pots of colorful paints. He already loved making pictures, and his first-grade teacher urged his mother to nurture his talent, which indeed she did. But when he was just six years old, his parents, German immigrants, decided to return to Germany. It was an ill-timed venture, as they were later to discover. Hitler and his Nazi party were on the rise, though at first this did not seem ominous to Eric's parents. They lived on the outskirts of Stuttgart, in his grandparents' four-family house, every unit of which was occupied by members of their large and affectionate extended family. Eric hated his German school and his disciplinarian teachers, but his new life was not without its pleasures. He especially loved taking long walks in the nearby countryside...

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