Bill Peet : An Autobiography

About the book

A 1990 Caldecott Honor Book Bill Peet tells his life story, including his years with Disney, with illustrations on every page.

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An excellent blend of verbal and visual social history and self-revelation. Kirkus Reviews

Bill Peet Biography

William Bartlett Peet (né Peed; January 29, 1915 – May 11, 2002) was an American children's book illustrator and a story writer and animator for Walt Disney Animation Studios. Peet joined Disney in 1937 and worked first on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) near the end of its production. Progressively, his involvement in the Disney studio's animated feature films and shorts increased, and he remained there until early in the development of The Jungle Book (1967). A row with Walt Disney over the direction of the project led to a permanent personal break. Peet's subsequent career was as a writer and illustrator of numerous children's books, including Capyboppy (1966), The Wump World (1970), The Whingdingdilly (1970), The Ant and the Elephant (1972), and Cyrus the Unsinkable Serpent (1975).

Early life

Bill Peet was born in Grandview, Indiana, on January 29, 1915. He developed a love of drawing at an early age and filled tablets with sketches. According to his autobiography, Peet's happiest childhood times were the years following World War I - years during which his father abandoned the family. During that period Peet lived with his mother and brothers on the outskirts of Indianapolis, in a household run by his maternal grandmother.Animals were always a love of Peet's. He and his friends traipsed through the woods looking for frogs, tadpoles, and minnows. Most of his adventures as a boy to catch animals were in the hope that he could capture them and sketch them. These years laid the groundwork for two primary themes repeated in his books: unkindness in the animal kingdom and the grim costs of human progress. "It has always been difficult for me to accept nature's cruel ways of keeping a balance among the animals - all the savagery and suffering," he wrote about the frogs and snakes he chased in his local creek. "Yet nature's merciless ways were never more cruel than the slow, silent death caused by the poisonous waste spilling from pipes down into the creek... where dead fish floated belly up and a nauseating stench filled the air."Often, instead of doing lessons, Peet drew in the margins of his textbooks, which were very popular for their added illustrations when he sold them back. The young Peet also snuck into greeting parties at the train station, just for the chance to see the train's mechanical workings close-up. As a teen, he tried to sketch the circus big top, but he was always in the way of the set-up crew. He memorized the scene and later reconstructed it from memory. After ten years of absence, Peet's father returned to the household and, according to Peet, brought with him conflict and strife - demanding that Peet's mother provide money to underwrite a string of failed ventures as a traveling salesman. This chapter culminated in the death of Peet's grandmother, which Peet implied was in part caused by the stress and misery his father caused. The home where the family lived was sold, and Peet's blissful young years ... Read full biography