Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

"Sentimentality is a failure of feeling," wrote Wallace Stevens. Legendary children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom would have agreed. Her engrossing correspondence reveals a long struggle to free kids' lit from the cloying baby talk that characterized the genre when she was a child. Although Nordstrom -- who worked at Harper & Row from 1931 to 1979 -- rejected stories that glorified a sterile nuclear family, she would never have endorsed facile it-takes-a-village multiculturalism either. Nordstrom threw herself into a messy, meta-political world of raw imagination and followed her own mandate: to publish "good books for bad children." Her literary offspring include Harriet the Spy, Charlotte's Web, Where the Wild Things Are and scads of other titles that conjure up a kid in bed, after hours, secretly turning pages with the aid of a forbidden flashlight.

Nordstrom's authors were among the first to address topics such as racial tension, homoeroticism and divorce. But breaking taboos was not her primary goal. Nordstrom prided herself on recognizing, and attending to, genius -- as her charmingly effusive letters demonstrate. To Maurice Sendak, whom she discovered in 1951 when the illustrator was still a window dresser at F.A.O. Schwarz, she writes, "Emotion combined with an artist's talent is ... RARE." Nordstrom saw herself as a conduit between author and child, sternly warning one critic "not to sift [his] reactions ... through [his] adult prejudices and neuroses."

The early letters in this well-edited collection recall a New York of carbon copies, cigarette smoke and author-publisher fidelity. Photographs show the stable of Harper authors with whom the editor communed from her vintage desk: Margaret Wise Brown, E.B. White, Shel Silverstein and so on. A daughter of the Depression, Nordstrom was troubled by wasted paper, and tried to cover each page of stationery completely before she pulled it from her typewriter. The result, as Leonard Marcus explains in his marvelous introduction, was "a solid, single-spaced wall of words."

Nordstrom was concerned about wasted talent, too. By turns girlish and maternal, stubborn and dismissive, she coached her "geniuses" aggressively. When her authors' family obligations interfered with the production schedule, she could be a real bully -- an odd attitude for a children's book editor but one that yielded bestsellers. In spite of her prodding, she never failed to entertain her correspondents. Nordstrom shared thoughts about creative vision, self-doubt, God and, inevitably, whether the monster on page such-and-such should look delighted or demented or both. Her letters lay bare the scaffolding behind the magic stage of picture books.

Childless herself, Nordstrom lived with her companion, Mary Griffith, and died of ovarian cancer in 1988. During her impressive tenure, she rarely lost an author to a rival publisher. Her no-nonsense style meshed well with her innate ability to understand kids. When asked by a librarian to state her qualifications as a publisher of children's literature, the editor answered sharply, "I am a former child." Readers of this unusual volume can imagine Nordstrom back at her office after that exchange, dashing off another breathless letter about ignorant grownups. -- Salon

Although he has the deepest respect for his subject, Marcus is not awestruck and includes letters that show her more human side (e.g., in a letter to writer Janice May Udry, she says 'I may have tried to have you understand that I am surrounded by moon-flowers. That is balderdash, dear... I am a real mess.') For the modern minions of corporate publishing, Marcus also offers evidence that Nordstrom, the first woman vice-president to head a Harper publishing division, also struggled to keep her books above the bottom line (e.g., from a letter to Robert Lipsyte, 'I am going to stop going to a lot of budget meetings, sessions about inventory revaluation and this summer will become an editor again'). An epistolary history of some of the highlights of children's literature, this extraordinary volume speaks to anyone who loves words, books or children.

Her editorial acumen and innate talent for nurturing, not smothering, her authors is apparent in her comments, as is her ability to sense the societal and aesthetic changes of the 20th century. It was her decision, after all, to publish both Harriet the Spy and Where the Wild Things Are, the two books which in content and execution mark the beginning of the modern age in books for children.

Nor were those decisions lightly made. In a letter to Nat Hentoff, composed two years after the publication of Wild Things, she gives as cogent an analysis of its impact as can be found anywhere, describing it as 'the first complete work of art in the picture book field, conceived, written, illustrated, executed in entirety by one person of authentic genius.' Nordstrom's wit is also much in evidence: 'I returned to my mortgaged little gray home on the hill...and the telephone was ringing and it was an author telephoning long distance to tell me good news about the third chapter, which was better than bad news about the third chapter but frankly no news about the third chapter was what I was longing to hear at that time on Sunday.' Although all her associations with authors and illustrators were memorable, not all were happy -- Meindert de Jong, for example, severed connections with her after considerable success under her guidance; she was continually concerned about John Steptoe's well-being. These insights into her personality can be approached chronologically -- the method by which the letters are organized -- or by using the index (not included in galley) to trace the development of a particular author or illustrator. Judicious use of footnotes and an extensive list of sources transform a beguiling compendium into an exemplary reference and scholarly resource as well. -- Horn