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1. Arnold Lobel was born in Los Angeles in 1933.
2. Arnold was bullied in school for the way that he looked.
3. Arnold always had a passion for art but found writing difficult.
4. Arnold's inspiration for Frog and Toad came from his childhood memories of collecting frogs and toads in the summers.
5. Frog and Toad Together was a 1973 Newberry Honor book.
6.In 1981 Arnold Lobel won the Caldecotte medal for most distinguished picture book.
7.. Arnold illustrated nearly 100 children's books.
8. Arnold and his wife, Anita Kempler, collaborated on several books.
9.Arnold had two kids, Adam and Adrianna.
10. Arnold Lobel Died at 54 years old in 1987 from cardiac arrest.

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When Arnold Lobel was growing up in Schenectady, New York, he was out of school and sick through most of second grade. One of the ways he kept himself occupied was by drawing. Somewhat hesitant about returning to school, he used his animal drawings as a way to make friends with his classmates. It has been said that his sets of books about animal friends, such as Frog and Toad, were based on these experiences. Lobel himself commented "Frog and Toad are really two aspects of myself."

His health improved, and upon graduting high school, he decided to improve his artistic skills and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he focused on illustration and met his future wife Anita, also a talented illustrator. They settled in Brooklyn and had two children Adrianne and Adam. The Prospect Park Zoo was right across the meadow from their apartment, and the family would go there often. These trips to the zoo gave him the idea for the Mister Muster book. He dedicated it to Anita, Adrianna, and Adam. He and his wife worked in the same studio, on their own projects and on collaborations.

Lobel's books are warm, funny tales of love and friendship, most featuring animals as the main characters. His book Frog and Toad was a Caldecott Honor book in 1971. His lighthearted yet morally instructive book Fables won the Caldecott Medal in 1981. He has also illustrated many books by other authors, including Charlotte Zolotow's The Quarreling Book.

Lobel called himself a daydreamer instead of an author or an artist. He would see the pictues in his mind before he would think up the words to go with them. "I cannot think of any work that could be more agreeable and fun than making books for children." Lobel has said. He died in 1987 leaving a legacy of almost 100 books that he had written or illustrated.

For a complete list of works by Lobel and suggestions for further reading,
please see these links:

Third Book of Junior Authors, Author Bio
http://www.edupaperback.org/authorbios/Lobel_Arnold.html

ERIC Bibliography
http://www.indiana.edu/~eric_rec/ieo/bibs/lobel.html

Parents' Choice commended books by Arnold Lobel:
Ming Lo Moves the Mountain(1982 Parents' Choice Gold Award)
Arnold Lobel.
Mulberry Books, ISBN: 0688109950
Ages 4-8.

The Book of Pigericks (1983 Parents' Choice Silver Honor)
Arnold Lobel. HarperCollins Children's Books, ISBN 0060239832.
[This title is currently out of print. Please check your local library or an out of print book dealer to locate a copy.]

The Rose in My Garden (1984 Parents' Choice Gold Award)
Arnold Lobel. Illustrated by Anita Lobel.
Mulberry Books, ISBN: 0688122655, $6.95.
Ages 4-8.

This horticultural mini-guide is a latter-day cumulative rhyme patterned, with humor and grace, after This is the House that Jack Built. Like Mistress Mary, Anita Lobel grows a decorative flower garden, a new blossom on every new page. The viewer's close attention is rewarded with the surprise discovery of an added small creature per page. The build-up is slow and quiet, thus allowing an attentive listener to savor the name of each exotic bloom. The climax, however, is fast, funny and not what you might expect. A special book from a special pair of collaborators.
Reviewed by Selma G. Lanes (1984 Parents' Choice)

A Three Hat Day (1985 Parents' Choice Gold Award)
Laura Geringer. Illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
HarperTrophy, ISBN: 0064431576

"R. R. Pottle the Third loved hats." His father "collected canes," his
mother "liked umbrellas." But "After a happy life together, Mother and
Father died." R. R. is lonely without them. Browsing in a hat store one day he meets Isabel, who recognizes a kindred hat lover. They dance down the road in the rain together. Time passes and R. R. Pottle the Fourth is born. It turns out she loves shoes. The sweet humor of this is decorated and enhanced by Arnold Lobel's full color accompaniment: the Pottle mansion is tastefully decorated in umbrellas and canes; R. R. the Third picks out a hat every morning by casting for it, while still in bed, with his fishing rod. Lobel has a gift for silliness that is never carried too far.
Reviewed by Karla Kuskin (1985 Parents' Choice)

The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose
(1987 Parents' Choice Gold Award)
Arnold Lobel
Knopf, ISBN 0679887369

The day Mother Goose met Mr. Lobel was a fortunate day. To make such handsome order out of so many bits and pieces, sayings and verses, is a Herculean task, but Arnold Lobel makes it look easy, as he organizes, decorates, and innovates. There are marvelous double-page spreads devoted to just one verse, cunning groupings in which one illustration serves a fellowship of rhymes, and spreads that use framed miniatures to accompany unrelated lyrics.

Lobel makes himself the master of each approach. His illustrations for
"The House That Jack Built" and "This is the Key of the Kingdom" are lessons in making graphic choreography of repeating verses. "Wee Willie Winkle" may be unrivaled in "Wee Willie Winkie" annals, and "The Old Woman Tossed Up In A Basket" is a symphony of windswept curves. "The 12 Days of Christmas" ought to be published on its own.
Reviewed by Karla Kuskin (1987 Parents' Choice)

The Devil and Mother Crump (1987 Parents' Choice Gold Award)
Valerie Scho Carey. Illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
HarperCollins, ISBN 0064432785

Mother Crump was so mean "her husband and children ran away from home just to get shut of her." But that doesn't faze her. She is a "baker woman"
whose disposition and bread peel would qualify as dangerous weapons. She
is quite capable of giving the Devil his due and does exactly that when he
comes calling. In fact, by the time Mother Crump kicks off, Lucifer is so
wary that he turns her away from his domain with one red-hot coal and the
advice "to go start a Hell of your own."

Arnold Lobel has less trouble with her. Working in watercolor and shading
with a black lithographic pencil, he sets her in darkly decorative pages
bursting with draped draperies, furled furbelows, funny faces and his own
brand of medieval atmosphere.
Reviewed by Karla Kuskin (1987 Parents' Choice)

The Tale of Meshka the Kvetch (1989 Parents' Choice Gold Award)
Carol Chapman. Illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
Unicorn Paperbacks (Dutton), ISBN: 0525444947
[This title is currently out of print. Please check your local library or an out of print book dealer to locate a copy.]

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When Arnold Lobel was growing up in Schenectady, New York, he was out of school and sick through most of second grade. One of the ways he kept himself occupied was by drawing. Somewhat hesitant about returning to school, he used his animal drawings as a way to make friends with his classmates.

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IT MAY BE years before the American children's book industry realizes what it has lost with the recent death of Arnold Lobel. Having illustrated nearly 100 titles (some of which he also wrote), Lobel was sometimes taken for granted within the trade. The critical response to his work was oddly ambivalent. He did join Wanda Ga'g, Robert Lawson and William Steig as the only illustrators to be honored by both the Caldecott committee for pictures and the Newbery for writing. Yet Barbara Bader ignored him in her mammoth survey of the 20th-century American children's book industry, American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within (1976). Surely Arnold Lobel is one of the few in the field who will be remembered into the next century.

Lobel served a long but fruitful apprenticeship as a picture-book artist. On graduating in 1955 from Pratt Institute (where he studied with Richard Lindner and met his wife Anita, also an illustrator), he found himself unable to break into the then tiny field of children's books. Instead Lobel went into advertising and, later, trade magazines, which he hated. He also painted portraits. By the late 1960s, however, after a period of rapid expansion in the field of children's books, Lobel had published several easy readers and original folktales, complete with fairly conventional illustrations; it was also rumored at the time that he was being groomed as Maurice Sendak's heir apparent, with his publishers having him illustrate the type of book -- Charlotte Zolotow's The Quarreling Book (1963), Judith Viorst's I'll Fix Anthony (1969) -- that Sendak had long ago abandoned.

In truth the two artists had little in common. While Sendak delved into the darker aspects of his psyche, Lobel's books for children remained sunny, warm, even cosy. "I'm really a very domestic kind of person," he explained. "There's a lot of furniture, a lot of accoutrements of the home, because that's what I am. I'm really not much of a traveller or wanderer or adventurer and I think that feeling certainly comes into my books." What Lobel offered young readers was reassurance. Unlike Sendak, Lobel rarely worked with collaborators of the first rank and generally avoided the classics. When asked to illustrate Aesop's Fables, sweet-natured Lobel was truly shocked by their content. "I found dogs tearing sheep into pieces," he admitted. "I found deer being chewed to bits by lions. I came upon harsh cruelties and bitter ironies of every sort."

But a guffaw is as good as a gasp. Lobel could illustrate Jack Prelutsky's tongue-in-cheek Nightmares (1976) with uncharacteristically comical Edward Goreyesque drawings. In fact his sensibility was more suited to nonsense verse than to fairy tales; it is a pity he never attempted a complete Edward Lear. He did produce the best modern interpretation of The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog (1968). As charming and unpretentious as an 18th-century chapbook, it is a quiet masterpiece of his vision of the picture book as a miniature play. "There is a little world at the end of my pencil," he explained. "I am the stage director, the costume designer, and the man who pulls the curtain."

But it was not until 1970, with the publication of Frog and Toad Are Friends, that Lobel's excellence was finally acknowledged. The book was immediately hailed as a classic. Now in complete command of his powers as a picture-book author and illustrator, Lobel followed this success with more ambitious productions. Some were disappointing: Lobel was by nature a miniaturist, so the more grandiose his intention, the less satisfying the book. His first full-color book, The Man Who Took the Inside Out (1974), was a bad imitation of Lear. His most honored work, Fables (1980), is a suite of what are perhaps his prettiest pictures, tasteful, classic and conservative. Yet Lobel lacked the anger to be a great fabulist.

When relaxed, however, Lobel could produce some of the most delightful children's books of recent years. Being light-hearted is not the same as being lightweight. His lively watercolors for Doris Orgel's nonsense verses Merry Merry FIBruary as well as those for his own Gregory Griggs and Other Nursery Rhyme People (1978) are as good as anything he has done. The latter, a boisterous collection of little known Mother Goose rhymes, contains many of Lobel's most spirited designs, making good use of his muted, appropriately 18th-century, Thomas Rowlandsonian palette.

He followed Gregory Griggs with two more generally overlooked picture books, a remarkable collection of original limericks, The Book of Pigericks (1983), and a nonsense verse exercise of his own, Whiskers and Rhymes (1985). As a writer, Lobel also helped bring out the best in his wife Anita by providing the texts for two of her finest efforts, On Market Street (1981) and The Rose in My Garden (1984).

He and Jack Prelutsky produced the splendid Random House Book of Poetry for Children in 1983; an ambitious companion volume, The Random House Book of Mother Goose, appeared last year. Lobel admitted, "I hadn't been too pleased with the way Mother Goose had been handled by its recent interpreters . . . so polite, so genteel, so well behaved. My concept of Mother Goose is just the opposite: bawdy and naughty." But that was just bluff. Lobel softened the crudities of the 18th-century rhymes and produced arguably the jolliest Mother Goose of all time.

But Arnold Lobel will no doubt be remembered principally for his four Frog and Toad books, among the few easy readers of any lasting literary distinction. The author knew that the first, Frog and Toad Are Friends, was a landmark in his development as a writer. "When I first started writing," he said, "I would begin by writing stories for children that were really outside my own feelings." With the Frog and Toad stories, Lobel looked deeper within himself, drawing on his adult preoccupations that he then tilted towards child's concerns. Each tale contains some small dilemma -- a lost button, a bowl of tempting cookies, Toad's modesty when swimming -- always deftly solved with simple common sense and the gentlest childlike humor.

What holds these fragile incidents together is the strong friendship of Frog and Toad. They are among the great teams in juvenile literature, as memorable as Pooh and Piglet or Charlotte and Wilbur. Frog is like a wiser older brother to silly little Toad. Lobel wrote other clever early readers (notably Mouse Tales, 1972, and Mouse Soup, 1977), but they are mere whispers of the Frog and Toad stories. More than any of the other characters he created, Frog and Toad are children's friends. Lobel's pictures in soft mouse brown and leaf green beautifully define their personalities and their world; typical of Lobel's tender care with detail is the illustration of absurd Toad in his bathing suit with all the other animals, even the dragonflies, laughing hysterically.

The last tale in Fables, "The Mouse and the Sunshine," describes how a little mouse suffers many hardships before settling quietly by the seashore to watch the sun rise. The moral seems to summarize its author's career: "All the miles of a hard road are worth a moment of true happiness." It is to be hoped that Arnold Lobel found that moment himself.

Michael Patrick Hearn's most recent book is "The Porcelain Cat," illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. He is currently writing a biography of L. Frank Baum.

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IT MAY BE years before the American children's book industry realizes what it has lost with the recent death of Arnold Lobel. Having illustrated nearly 100 titles (some of which he also wrote), Lobel was sometimes taken for granted within the trade. The critical response to his work was oddly ambivalent.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

Arnold Lobel, an award-winning children's book author and illustrator, died of cardiac arrest Friday at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan. He was 54 years old and lived in Manhattan.

In his 26-year career, Mr. Lobel illustrated nearly 100 children's books and wrote the stories of many of them as well.

Among his most popular works was a series of four books about a frog and a toad, best friends who shared many adventures. ''Frog and Toad Together,'' the second in the series, was a 1973 Newberry Honor book, one of the most prestigious distinctions in children's literature.

Mr. Lobel was a serious, hard-working artist who loved children and animals. His books have been translated into dozens of foreign languages. Distinguished Book Award

In 1981, the American Library Association awarded Mr. Lobel the Caldecott Medal for most distinguished picture book of the year for ''Fables,'' a collection of animal tales, which he wrote and illustrated, about such characters as a kangaroo that throws spitballs and a camel that wants to become a ballet dancer.

Drawing came more naturally to Mr. Lobel than writing did.

''Writing is very painful to me,'' he said in an interview in 1979. ''I have to force myself not to think in visual terms, because I know if I start to think of pictures, I'll cop out on the text.''

Arnold Stark Lobel was born on May 22, 1933, in Los Angeles and grew up in Schenectady, N.Y.

He was a small, sickly child who was often bullied at school, but who made up for his physical shortcomings by enthralling his classmates with stories he invented. Story of Salmon

In 1955, Mr. Lobel graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with a degree in fine arts. That same year, he married Anita Kempler, another art student at Pratt, with whom he collaborated on several books in the ensuing years.

In 1961, he illustrated his first book, ''Red Tag Comes Back,'' a story about salmon swimming upstream to lay eggs.

The next year he published ''A Zoo for Mister Muster,'' about the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, which he wrote as well as illustrated.

Two works ''Dinosaurs,'' which he illustrated, and ''Turn Around Wind,'' which he wrote and illustrated, are scheduled to be published soon.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Lobel is survived by a daughter, Adrianne, a set designer who lives in Manhattan; a son, Adam, a musician who lives in Boston; and his mother, Lucille Bird, who lives in Florida.

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

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Nice book on beloved children's author Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad), inscribed by George Shannon on the title page.

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The Book Boys and Frog and Toad Are Friends

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Arnold Lobel Books | List of books by author Arnold Lobel

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Looking for books by Arnold Lobel? See all books authored by Arnold Lobel, including Frog And Toad Book Set: Frog And Toad Are Friends; Frog And Toad Together; Days With Frog And Toad; Frog And Toad All Year, and Frog and Toad Are Friends, and more on ThriftBooks.com.

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The story of Frog and Toad begins with Frog eager to spend his days with Toad; however, Toad is reluctant and much prefers spending his time in bed. Frog is full of energy and charisma while toad is more solemn and reserved. After Frog devices a plan to fool Toad into thinking that several months had past, Toad finally agrees to spend his time with Frog.  The two friends spend their days on a series of adventures including: telling stories, swimming, and writing each other letters. Frog and Toad are a perfect example that polar opposites can still be best friends.

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The story of Grasshopper on the Road begins with an adventurous and ambitious grasshopper who longs for to embark on a new journey. As Grasshopper travels he makes several stops along the way and meets many interesting characters. Each character has one thing in common, their need for a schedule and their hatred for change. The insects he meets attempt to covert Grasshopper into their systematic and mundane ways but Grasshopper refuses. After hours of traveling Grasshopper decides to rest, knowing that the world will be ready to explore in the morning.

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The story of Owl at Home begins with Owl sitting at home enjoying the warmth that his fire place provided. After hearing gusts of wind pounding against his door he decided to let winter come in and warm itself by the fire. On another night owl heads to bed and is alarmed to find two bumps in his covers and after struggling to remove them, Owl decided to make tear water tea and after thinking of things that make him cry he filled his tea kettle and enjoys his drink. Owl than decides to run up and down the stairs and after several minutes of this, he brings his exercise outside where he enjoys the company of his loyal friend.

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The story of Uncle Elephant begins when a young elephant learns that his parents have been lost at sea. After hearing the devastating news of his parents disappearance, he is greeted by his unconventional uncle, the two board a train together and head to Uncle Elephants home. After arriving at their destination, the elephant and his uncle spend much of their time on walks or in his home enjoying amusing and slightly odd activities. After growing very fond of his uncle, the young elephant receives the news that his parents have been rescued and he must return home. The uncle and nephew say their goodbyes and promise to visit each other often.

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The story of mouse soup begins with a mouse sitting under a tree while he enjoyed a good book. The mouse was interrupted by a weasel who snatched him up, took him home and through him in a pot to make mouse soup. The mouse agreed to be made into mouse soup but he warned his soup would be flavorless without stories. The mouse than told the weasel several stories about bees, mud, stones, crickets, and a thorn bush, he then instructed the weasel to gather these items and add them to his soup. while the weasel was gathering these ingredients, the crafty mouse escaped home to enjoy his book in peace.