Remembering Tomie dePaola

For The New Yorker, Naomi Fry reflects on celebrated children’s writer and illustrator Tomie dePaola, who died at the end of March. As the author of more than 270 works for children, dePaola leaves behind a sprawling legacy. “The universe of dePaola’s books is moral but not moralistic,” Fry writes. “There is disarray in it, and people are imperfect and can make mistakes, but there is goodness, too, and a larger sense that, since an omniscient narrator is often able to shepherd the books’ protagonists to safety, the same might perhaps prove true, by extension, for the lives of these books’ readers.”