I'll Be You and You Be Me

Ruth Krauss was one of the most widely celebrated children’s book authors of all time. Her long list of award-winning books includes The Carrot Seed, The Happy Day, A Hole Is to Dig, Open House for Butterflies, A Very Special House, and many others. Her books continue to be read and cherished by children throughout the world.

Maurice Sendak’s books have sold over 50 million copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages. He received the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are and is the creator of such classics as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, and Nutshell Library. In 1970 he received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Illustration, in 1983 he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association, and in 1996 he received a National Medal of Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts in America. In 2003 Sendak received the first Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an annual international prize for children’s literature established by the Swedish government.

“Author Ruth Krauss and illustrator Maurice Sendak, with a little help from some young friends, capture all the ups and downs of friendship. A charmingly meandering series of stories, poems, and pen-and-ink line drawings feels like a scrapbook of kid-speak.” - Amazon.com

“On each page is an idea of friendly play or loving inspiration, delightfully accompanied by the line drawings of an understanding artist, Maurice Sendak. The author must have listened with wide open mind to the many children to whom she has dedicated this entertaining little volume.” - Christian Science Monitor

“ . . . And anyone of any age will find the reality of childhood in Maurice Sendak’s pictures. Small, delicately drawn, they have a force and an ebullience out of all proportion to their size.” - New York Times

What a book! It is a Krauss-Sendak scrapbook, more or less on the theme of love and friendship as the nursery age expresses it in very brief stories, plays, ‘poems,’ ‘mysteries,’ dreams, and many potent exclamations stuck into corners of pages.” - New York Herald Tribune