GREAT ESCAPE: Lerer found school like prison, libraries a salvation. Glenn Matsumura

Maurice Sendak would probably roll his eyes to hear that my rowdy all-frosh dorm adopted Where the Wild Things Are as its theme, printing T-shirts knocked off from the pages of his best-known book. The legendary author/illustrator once told an interviewer that he’s all too used to “being a catchword every time someone needs something to be ‘wild.’” But for him, the wild things really mean something. They’re the turbulent feelings all children wrestle with—rage, fear, and pain and conflict, especially the inner sort. Kids yearn for freedom and adventure while craving security and comfort. They want independence from their parents and may wish to be rid of them, but dread that this wish will come true.

As Seth Lerer puts it, “I want to go where the wild things are, but I also want to be home for dinner.” Children’s books let kids have it both ways.

Lerer has studied children’s literature for 13 years and is working on a critical history of the subject. A professor of English and comparative literature, he’s interested in both recurring patterns and cultural variations—noting, for example, that when Puritan children learned their ABCs from The New England Primer, the little poem keyed to the letter ‘A’ reads “In Adam’s Fall, We sinned all.” The moral message is a particular of that time and place, but the form of the alphabet book is a constant.

So is the idea that, in a sense, all the world’s a book.  Alice in Wonderland is chock-full of scenes of reading and misreading, and many other kids’ books from Winnie the Pooh to the Harry Potter series speak to decoding the world.

“A lot of people think [Harry Potter] is about magic and myth, but in many ways it’s about reading and getting kids to read,” Lerer says. Just look at how often Harry and his pals head to the library to solve problems, with Hermione finding the answer in a book. The Monster Book of Monsters, Lerer adds, is an important element in the series because it shows “both how seductive and dangerous books can be.” After all, once you can read texts and signs, “you can, in your imagination, make anything come alive—whether it’s a stuffed animal or a wooden puppet or a train set.”

Lerer, who first made his mark as a medievalist, became interested in children’s literature while writing  Chaucer and His Readers; his research made him wonder how a work happens to become thought of as a children’s book, as The Canterbury Tales sometimes has. At about the same time, he became a father and started looking anew at some of the books he’d loved as a child.

‘A lot of people think Harry Potter is about magic and myth, but in many ways it’s about reading and getting kids to read.’

Until Lerer was 10, his family lived in a multiethnic, multilingual Brooklyn neighborhood, in which orphan and often were pronounced the same. In the second grade, he offered this pair as an answer during a lesson on homonyms—enraging his teacher, who thought he was mocking her. School felt like a prison, he says, but public libraries were salvation. There he discovered the work of  Robert McCloskey, whose “endearing and enduring” picture books, set in places like coastal Maine and a kindly Boston, showed a world enticingly different from Lerer’s own. In Blueberries for Sal, a mother takes her little girl blueberry picking. “I could never imagine my mother doing that,” he says.

Then again, little Sal probably couldn’t imagine her parents casting her in a Borscht Belt summer-camp skit as Ben Crazy, M.D. (Meshugeneh Doctor). Lerer’s parents, amateur thespians, ran the theater program at a camp “for the privileged Brooklyn aristocracy,” and being sent there at 5, Lerer says, “was part of the nightmare of childhood.” (Lerer has an impressive memory for detail, informing me that his bunkmate was the bed-wetting heir to the Waldbaum supermarket fortune.) Such early experiences help explain Lerer’s fascination with the theatricality of children’s literature. “For me the classic is Pinocchio,” he says. “‘I’ve Got No Strings’—that was the story of my life.”

To become a real boy, of course, Pinocchio had to stop being a puppet. Something similar happens in Augustine’s Confessions, in which the young seeker bemoans the folly of being enraptured by the theater. Augustine’s memoir isn’t for kids, but to Lerer it’s a paradigm for the theme of many children’s books: shedding the theatrical on a path to self-discovery.

If that’s so, what about Sendak’s Max, who wears a wolf suit throughout his journey toward inner peace? “The whole point of so many fables and fairy tales is to unmask the wolf in sheep’s (or Grandma’s) clothing,” Lerer points out, so Sendak is subverting an anti-theatrical archetype. This ambivalence fascinates Lerer. You might need to shed some roles to find yourself, but children’s literature teaches that, for example, “there are times when it’s right to be a princess, and times when it’s right to be a commoner.” The paradox is even richer, he says, for at times “theater enables us to present ourselves in ways that are ‘truer’ to ourselves than we might be able to present in real life,” as Max finds. Playing dress-up can be liberating.

“That’s a big part of the power and appeal of children’s books,” says Shirley Brice Heath, a professor emerita of English and dramatic literature who 10 years ago taught a children’s literature class with Lerer—the first in the English department, she believes. “Harry Potter is not a child. He’s something else—a child being lots of something elses.”

J.K. Rowling’s novels tap into another mainstay of kids’ books, says Lerer: the fantasy that unlike adults—whom children’s authors often depict as dull, rule-bound or inept—every child is special, with gifts and talents waiting to be recognized. “All children believe they’re wizards and their parents are ‘muggles.’  ”

Muggles may find it hard to imagine that children get all this out of stories, but Lerer believes some do. “Why do kids re-read books once they know the plot?” When his son was 10, he says, the boy again and again read Louis Sachar’s Holes, about a strange camp in which children must spend their days digging holes in search of who-knows-what. Holes, Lerer says, shows that “being a child is like being in prison,” an idea that speaks to any kid who feels trapped in the role of student or son or daughter. But there’s a treasure to be found, which offers escape. McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine, about digging for clams, can also be read this way, according to Lerer: “How can I dig my way out of this life?

Lerer picks up Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and reads the passage: There is nothing “half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Then he opens a 1916 edition of The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, compiled by Grahame. After marveling that such a rare book can be checked out from the Stanford libraries, he reads a line from Shelley: “My soul is an enchanted boat.”

“He’s giving children a little key,” says Lerer—a clue to the meaning of the boat in Wind in the Willows. “It’s a soul journey, not just a physical journey.” Thinking back to Huck Finn’s raft, I’m sold. (It helps that Lerer has been asked to write an annotated Wind in the Willows, while my knowledge of the book comes largely from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.) At home later, I leaf through a well-worn Where the Wild Things Are and a detail leaps out for the first time. Max’s boat, the one he sails on his dream voyage, has a name—and not just any name, but his own.

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