Eric Carle

Eric Carle is one of the most celebrated children's books author and illustrator of our times.Paper Masters will custom write you a research paper on Carle's works, his life or any aspect of children's literature you need.

According to Tim Arnold of Book list, "Almost no author/illustrator over the past 30 years has played a more prominent role in the literary lives of preschoolers than Eric Carle." A prolific creator, his accolades include:

• Carle has published over 50 books and has illustrated countless others.
• His work has been translated into thirty languages and he has sold over 45 million copies worldwide.
• His most famous book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, published in 1969, has been translated into over 25 languages and sold 15 million copies.
• Today over 70 years old, Eric Carle continues to create from his studio Northampton, Massachusetts.

Eric Carle - His Early years

Mr. Carle was born in Syracuse, New York on June 25, 1929. The son of German immigrants, Eric Carle returned to Stuttgart in Hitler's Germany in 1935 because his mother missed the warm circle of a large extended family. Their timing was uncanny. In 1939 the war broke out; Carle's father was drafted and they would not see him again until he returned from Russian POW camp in 1947. In 1944 the family was evacuated from Stuttgart; Carle spent the rest of the war digging trenches with Russian and Italian POW s on the Siegfried line.

Eric did not like school in Germany. The sunny Upstate New York classroom was replaced by, in Carle's words, "narrow windows, a hard pencil and a small sheet of paper." But Carle did take a liking to art class, and his art teacher, a Herr Krauss, introduced him to the then forbidden works of artists such as Picasso, Klee and Matisse. After the war Carle enrolled in the Akademie der bildenden Kunste in Stuttgart, from which he graduated in 1950.

Eric Carle's Career

In 1952 Carle returned to America - but at the ripe age of 23, he was soon drafted and sent back to serve on a U.S. army base in Stuttgart. There, he met his first wife, Dorothea Wohlenberg, with which he had his two children, Cirsten and Rolf. Back in the U.S., he joined the New York Times, where he worked from 1952 to 1956 as a graphic designer. From 1956 to 1963 he was an art director with the advertising firm of L.W. Frolic, but in 1963 he abandoned the professional career path in favor of work as a freelancer.