Your child, the literary talent
When author Ruth Krauss and illustrator Maurice Sendak collaborated on several acclaimed children’s books in the 1950s, such as “A Hole Is to Dig,” their ideas came, in part, from interviews Krauss had conducted with kids. That might surprise some people, who may assume that adults writing for children draw primarily from their own imaginations. But it makes sense to Marah Gubar, an MIT professor who specializes in upending assumptions about children’s literature. Gubar’s research has uncovered a lost landscape of once-popular children’s literature and theater, in many cases written by women. She has also found that kids have often contributed to the creation of children’s books, as storytellers, correspondents, and more. “Children’s literature is full of examples of people who were inspired by children,” Gubar says. But too often, she adds, people “take for granted that adults are the only ones participating in the production of children’s literature.” Now Gubar, a faculty...