Spend any time scanning a list of banned books and you’ll find some head-scratchers: picture books challenged for including seemingly gay characters in the background, or describing a difficult moment in history, or revealing a naked goblin butt. Among the most banned picture books of the last school year, one title in particular seemed puzzling: Eric Carle’s Draw Me a Star.

Article continues after advertisement

Carle is best known for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the first book I read to my son when he was a baby. I’m surely not alone in that; more than fifty years after its publication, it was the third-bestselling children’s book of 2023, trailing only the latest Dog Man and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

What scandal could Carle, one of America’s most beloved picture book creators, have perpetrated in this banned board book?

Draw Me a Star tells the story of an artist creating his way through the world. “Draw me a star,” it begins, and the artist draws a star. The star asks him to draw a sun, and eventually a woman and a man: “And the artist drew a handsome couple.”

The couple is indeed handsome, drawn in Carle’s trademark, flat collage style. Alas for children in school districts in Florida, Iowa, and Texas, the couple is also naked. The book has been banned in at least four school districts since 2021, and other schools have covered the handsome couple in paper clothes.

What those who redact Carle’s childlike art probably don’t realize is that it was inspired by his own response to censorship growing up in Nazi Germany.

What those who redact Carle’s childlike art probably don’t realize is that it was inspired by his own response to censorship growing up in Nazi Germany. “Hitler dictated not only politics and everything, he also dictated art,” he told NPR in 2011.

Carle was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929 to German immigrants who returned to Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. His father was drafted into the army and taken prisoner by the Soviets. Carle himself was forced to dig trenches.

Before the war, when Carle was twelve, an art teacher, Herr Krauss, invited Carle to his home to see the work of “degenerate” expressionist artists. Carle couldn’t remember later exactly what he saw—but he felt it must have included Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and perhaps Franz Marc’s Blue Horse.

Seeing it was a shock. Until then, Carle had experienced only art depicting “flag-waving, gun-toting Aryans”—painted in a realistic style. Hitler, the failed artist, rejected the abstract, modern art then in vogue in art schools. In 1937, Hitler put on an exhibit of “degenerate” expressionist art, some of which was later burned.

Carle returned to the United States, where he found success as a creator of children’s books. He dedicated his book From Head to Toe to Herr Krauss, “who introduced me to modern art even though it was forbidden.”

Late in his life, Carle published The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, about Marc and art that dared to see things differently. Asked what he hoped the book would impart to kids, he said: “There is no wrong color, really. And also, one must not stay within the lines.”

Books for children are meant to reflect children’s lives and expose them to the world around them.

In the frenzy of challenges to books containing nudity of any sort—including goblin nudity—Draw Me a Star takes pride of place beside Maruice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen and David Shannon’s No, David!

Draw Me a Star was challenged several times in Carle’s lifetime, including in 1996 in a Seattle suburb where a parent called it “soft pornography” that might encourage children to draw naked bodies themselves. Carle’s publicist faxed his response to the Seattle Times.

“It surprised me that you are disturbed by my depictions of the innocently naked couple,” he wrote.

My illustration style is “generic,” as a friend told me. Another friend, an art critic, compared my pictures favorably to primitive cave paintings. I am pleased with that analogy, for I attempt to simplify nature for children, and through fact and fantasy, to give joy and to help first readers fall in love with books.

Those searching for “degenerate” art in school libraries today aren’t merely censors—they’re missing the point. Books for children are meant to reflect children’s lives and expose them to the world around them. They’re meant to inspire curiosity and a love of learning.

What Carle wasn’t allowed to see growing up in Germany spurred a life of art. Perhaps the next generation in Florida, Iowa, and Texas will be inspired in the same way when they see work like Carle’s that they’ve been shielded from.

______________________________

Can You Imagine? The Art and Life of Yoko Ono by Lisa Tolin and illustrated by Yas Imamura is available via Atheneum Books for Young Readers.