Leonard Weisgard
Encyclopedia
Leonard Joseph Weisgard was an award-winning American author and illustrator
Illustrator
An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...

 of more than 200 children's books, most famous for his collaborations with Margaret Wise Brown
Margaret Wise Brown
Margaret Wise Brown was a prolific American author of children's literature, including the books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd.-Biography:...

. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...

, and spent most of his childhood in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

Weisgard studied art at the Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...

. His first book, Suki the Siamese Pussy, was published in 1937 and his first collaboration with Brown was two years later with The Noisy Books. The Little Island, written by Brown and illustrated by Weisgard, won the Caldecott Medal
Caldecott Medal
The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children , a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year. The award was named in honor of nineteenth-century English...

 in 1948. They collaborated again on The Important Book, published by Harper & Brothers in 1949.

Weisgard married Phyllis Monnot in 1951 and, with her and their three children, moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1969. He died on January 14, 2000, in Denmark.

External links

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