1933-1987 · American author and illustrator of children's books, creator of Frog and Toad
About Arnold Lobel
Arnold Lobel (1933-1987) was born in Los Angeles on May 22, 1933, and grew up in Schenectady, New York, raised largely by his grandparents. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he met the illustrator Anita Kempler; they married in 1955 and sometimes worked together. He wrote or illustrated nearly a hundred books. Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970) was a Caldecott Honor book, as was Hildilid's Night (1972); Frog and Toad Together received a Newbery Honor in 1973, and his Fables won the Caldecott Medal in 1981. Lobel said that Frog and Toad were really two sides of himself. He died in New York City on December 4, 1987.
Frog and Toad Are Friends is a book of five short stories about two friends who live near each other by a meadow and a stream. In "Spring," Frog runs to Toad's house in April to wake him from his winter sleep, but Toad, who has been in bed since November, will not get up and asks Frog to come back at about half past May.
Owl at Home is a beginning reader of five short stories about Owl, a round, kindly, rather muddled bird who lives alone in a snug house with a fireplace, a kettle and a staircase. In The Guest, someone knocks loudly on a winter night.
Mouse Soup is a story with four smaller stories inside it. A mouse is sitting under a tree reading a book when a weasel pounces on him, carries him home and puts him into a cooking pot to make mouse soup.
Grasshopper on the Road is an easy-reader book of six short linked stories about a grasshopper who decides one morning to follow a road wherever it leads, and about the creatures he meets on the way, each of whom has made one idea the whole of life.
In "The Club," a crowd of beetles welcomes him to their We Love Morning club and chants the praises of dew and sunrise, until Grasshopper admits that he also likes afternoon and night; they throw him out, and he walks on.