By subject: Clicking on the subject will return you to the relevant section of the syllabus.
- Should We Burn Babar?: Jean de Brunhoff, The Travels of Babar (1934), Babar and His Children (1938)
- Oz: Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Wizard of Oz: Centennial Edition (Norton, 2000); Michael O'Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1997).
- E. Nesbit: Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1987)
- Carl Sandburg: Penelope Niven, Carl Sandbug: A Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1991); Julia Mickenberg, "Of Funnybones and Steamshovels: Juvenille Publishing, Progressive Education, and the Lyrical Left." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 28.3 (Fall 2003): 144-157.
- Racism and Anti-Racism: Testimony of Langston Hughes, March 24, 1953 ("McCarthy Transcripts Released," All Things Considered, NPR, 7 May 2003); Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford UP, 1986); Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Not So Simple: The 'Simple' Stories by Langston Hughes (Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 1995); Donnarae McCann, White Supremacy in Children's Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (Garland, 2000); Michelle H. Martin, Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Picture Books, 1845-2002 (Routledge, forthcoming April 2004); Katharine Capshaw Smith, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana UP, forthcoming July 2004).
- Dr. Seuss: Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel (Random House, 1995); Richard Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War (New Press, 1999); Philip Nel, Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004); Charles Cohen, The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss (Random House, 2004); Philip Nel, Dr. Seuss on the Web (links)
- Crockett Johnson: Philip Nel, "'Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple': Crockett Johnson and the Politics of the Purple Crayon," Children's Literature 29 (2001), pp. 142-74; Nel, "Crockett Johnson and the Purple Crayon: A Life in Art," Comic Art 5 (Winter 2004), pp. 2-18; Nel, The Crockett Johnson Homepage (1998-)
- Bank Street School: Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (1987); Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (1992); Maurice Sendak, "Ruth Krauss and Me: A Very Special Partnership," Horn Book, June 1994, pp 286-290.
- Leo Lionni: Leo Lionni, Between Worlds: The Autobiography of Leo Lionni (1997).
General: Secondary Sources on Children's Literature and the Left: Print | Web
- Children's Lit
- Babara Bader, American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within (1976)
- Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, eds., The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984)
- Althea K. Helbig and Agnes Regan Perkins, This Land Is Our Land: A Guide to Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults (1994).
- Leonard S. Marcus, A Caldecott Celebration (1998), Author Talk (2000), and others
- Barbara Rollock, ed., Black Authors and Illustrators of Children's Books: A Biographical Dictionary (1992)
- Anita Silvey, Children's Books and Their Creators (1995)
- The Children's Literature Review series (1976-)
- The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 22, 42, 52, 61, 141, 160, 161, 163, and any other of the volumes devoted to Children's Literature (1983-)
- The Junior Book of Authors series (1934-89)
- The Something About the Author series (1971-)
- The Left
- Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left, Second Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998).
- Christopher DeNoon, Posters of the WPA, 1935-1943 (Los Angeles, CA: The Wheatley Press, 1987).
- Eliza T. Dresang, Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1999).
- Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2002).
- Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1985): See the chapters concerning PM.
- Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, eds., Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (U of Illinois P, 1998)
- Harry L. Katz, ed., Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings from the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection, 1912-1948 (Washington: Library of Congress, 1999)
- James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1995), Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1999).
- Julia Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children's Literature and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2005); Mickenberg, "The Pedagogy of the Popular Front: Progressive Parenting for a New Generation, 1918-1945," The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Caroline Levander and Carol Singley (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003), pp. 226-45; Mickenberg, "Civil Rights, History and the Left: Inventing the Juvenile Black Biography," MELUS: Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States 27:2 (Summer 2002), pp. 65-93; "Red Diaper Girls," Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Miriam Formanek-Brunell (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), pp. 552-58; Mickenberg, "Communist in a Coonskin Cap? Meridel Le Sueur’s Books for Children and the Reformulation of America’s Cold War Frontier Narrative," The Lion and the Unicorn 21 (1997), pp. 59-85.
- Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940-1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997)
- Paul C. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia UP, 1999).
- Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York: International Publishers, 1969).
- Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina P, 2002)
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (HarperCollins, frequently revised).
- Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (London: Heinemann, 1979), Fairytales and the Art of Subversion (London: Heinrmann, 1983), Don't Bet on the Prince (New York: Methuen, 1986).
- Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
Web
- Marxists Internet Archive's Children's Literature pages, featuring an Annotated Bibliography, Texts and Illustrations, and Resources and Reference.
- McCarthy Hearings transcripts
- Text of McCarthy Hearings, 1953-1954 (Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Committee Prints, 107th Congress, January 2003). See also McCarthy Hearings Published (U.S. Senate, Reference).
- Testimony of Helen Goldfrank (a.k.a. Helen Kay), March 24, 1953
- Testimony of Langston Hughes, March 24, 1953 ("McCarthy Transcripts Released," All Things Considered, NPR, 7 May 2003).
- Testimony of Aaron Copeland, May 26, 1953 ("McCarthy Transcripts Released," All Things Considered, NPR, 7 May 2003).
- My Children's Literature links
- My Cartoons & Comics links
- Jane Addams Book Award, honoring "children's books that build for peace"
- Banned Books Week, sponsored by the American Library Association. Includes links to the Top 100 Banned Books, 1990-2000, and information on Challenged and Banned Books
General: Literature for Children and Young Adults
The Marxist Internet Archive's
Annotated Bibliography is an excellent resource for finding progressive children's books on a wide range of topics, including several books that are explicitly Marxist. You might begin with this site. The list below (assembled by yours truly) is incomplete and unnanotated, but it's one place you might go next.