Author's information
Robert Munsch
I was born on June 11, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I grew up in a family of 9 kids. At least, that is where I lived when I was young. My mother says I never grew up and still act like I was 6 years old. She may be right, but I figure that I act like a very mature 6 year old.
When I was 12 my older brother kicked me in the mouth the day after I got my braces off. He broke off some of my front teeth and knocked me out. My dad says I have been acting strange ever since. My mom says I always acted strange.
I almost flunked first grade and also the second, third, fourth, and fifth; but my younger brother was in the grade behind me, and he was a brain and nobody wanted to have me be in the same grade as him, so they kept passing me. I never learned how to spell, graduated from eighth grade counting on my fingers to do simple addition, and in general was not a resounding academic success.
I did, however, all through elementary school, write poetry. Funny poems, silly poems, all sorts of poems. Nobody thought that was very important, including me. When I went to high school, I didn’t get along with anybody, read lots of books and decided to be a Catholic Priest.
I studied for 7 years to be a Jesuit priest, only to find that I was lousy priest material. [While I was studying with the Jesuits, I got an undergraduate degree in History and a Master’s degree in Anthropology. A Master’s degree in Anthropology isn’t worth much, but that’s what they give you when you flunk your orals for your Ph. D.]
While I was studying to be a Jesuit priest, I worked part-time at an orphanage to escape from deadly classes in philosophy. So I knew I liked working with kids; and when I left the Jesuits I decided to work in daycare for a year till I figured out what I wanted to do; and what I figured out I wanted to do was: work in daycare.
After I had been in daycare for awhile I decided to learn something about what I was supposed to be doing, so I went back to school for a year at the Elliot Pearson School of Child Studies at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. It was there that I made up my first story while on a student teaching placement at the Wellsley College Child Studies Preschool. I did it for a circle time. I did not know that it was going to be a book called “Mortimer”. It took it 12 years to get to be a book.
Back in daycare I discovered that I could get the kids to shut up during nap time by telling them stories. For ten years I did this without thinking I had any special skill. After all, while I made the best stories in the daycare centre, most of the other teachers made better play doh. I eventually got a long list of stories I told, but I never wrote them down.
Once when my wife [I met her over a diaper at Bromley Heath Infant Daycare in Jamaica Plain, Mass] and I were both out of work because a daycare lost its’ funding, we decided to try to look for work in Canada. We both ended up at a lab preschool at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. The wife of my boss happened to be a CHILDREN’S LIBRARIAN and she heard me telling stories.
She told me to publish and I didn’t listen, she told my boss to make me publish and my boss told me to publish and I listened. In fact, he gave me two months off to do it. So I had a great two months off and on the last day, I wrote down 10 stories and sent them off to 10 different publishers. Nine said, “No” and one said, “Yes” to a story called ‘Mud Puddle’.
So I became a writer. Mud Puddle sold 3000 copies the first year.
Oh WoW!
But Annick press kept putting out my books and they slowly sold better and better. [Mud Puddle had its’ best year 10 years after it was published!]. Finally I quit my job at the University and started just writing and telling stories. About then I became a Canadian citizen and lost my American citizenship. It was nice to have only one country again.
Illustrator 's Information
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