A short life of the author
Crockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk, 20 October 1906 – 11 July 1975) was an American cartoonist, children’s book author, and painter whose Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) is one of the most original and influential picture books in the history of children’s literature — a work of disarming simplicity that asks profound questions about imagination, creation, and the relationship between the artist and the world he makes.
Early Career and Barnaby
Johnson was born in New York City to immigrant parents. He studied art at Cooper Union and NYU, worked as an art editor for various magazines during the 1930s, and in 1941 created Barnaby, a comic strip for the newspaper PM and later the New York Star. The strip featured a five-year-old boy and his fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley — a cigar-smoking, bureaucratic, thoroughly incompetent fairy who claimed to perform magic but never actually did.
Barnaby was a critical sensation. Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, and Crockett’s own friend and neighbour Ruth Krauss (the children’s author, whom he married in 1943) praised it. The strip’s sophisticated wit, understated drawing style, and typeset (rather than hand-lettered) dialogue balloons made it unlike any other newspaper comic. It never achieved mass popularity — its humour was too dry, its aesthetic too minimalist — but it influenced a generation of cartoonists, including Charles Schulz.
Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955)
The book’s premise is irreducible: a small boy named Harold goes for a walk one night, drawing his world with a purple crayon as he goes. He draws a path, then a forest, then a dragon, then a mountain, then a balloon, then the moon. When he draws himself into danger — the dragon, a fall from the mountain — he draws himself out again. When he wants to go home, he draws his bedroom window and his bed, and falls asleep.
The genius lies in what Johnson strips away. There is no setting apart from what Harold draws. There are no other characters. There is no conflict beyond Harold’s own imagination encountering its consequences. The blank white page is both the void before creation and the infinite field of possibility. Harold’s purple line is simultaneously art, narrative, and reality — the act of drawing, the act of storytelling, and the act of world-making are identical.
The book sold modestly on publication but grew into a perennial classic. It has never been out of print. It has been translated into dozens of languages. It was adapted into an animated television series and, in 2024, a live-action film starring Zachary Levi.
The Harold Sequels
Johnson wrote six more Harold books: Harold’s Fairy Tale (1956), Harold’s Trip to the Sky (1957), Harold at the North Pole (1958), Harold’s Circus (1959), A Picture for Harold’s Room (1960), and Harold’s ABC (1963). Each follows the same formal logic — Harold draws his adventure as he experiences it — but none matches the original’s concentrated perfection. The sequels are charming variations on a theme; the original is the theme itself.
Other Children’s Books
Johnson wrote and illustrated several other picture books, including The Carrot Seed (1945, written by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Johnson), a beloved picture book about a boy who plants a carrot seed and patiently believes it will grow despite everyone telling him it won’t. It is a companion piece to Harold in its faith in individual vision against social scepticism.
Ellen’s Lion (1959) and its sequel The Lion’s Own Story (1963) feature a girl’s conversations with her stuffed lion — miniature dialogues that play on the boundary between imagination and reality. We Wonder What Will Walter Be? When He Grows Up (1964) is a whimsical exploration of possibility.
The Paintings
In the 1960s, Johnson largely retired from publishing and devoted himself to painting. His canvases — geometric abstractions based on mathematical theorems (the Pythagorean theorem, the golden ratio, theorems about pi) — are paintings that literally illustrate mathematical relationships through colour and shape. They are held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History. The connection to Harold is clear: Johnson remained fascinated by the relationship between abstract formal systems and visual representation.
Critical Standing
Harold and the Purple Crayon has been claimed by literary critics, art theorists, philosophers, and educators. It has been read as a parable of artistic creation, a demonstration of narrative theory (the story is self-generating), a lesson in Kantian epistemology (Harold creates his own phenomenal world), and a manual for creative thinking. The book’s influence on subsequent picture books — from Where the Wild Things Are to Not a Box — is pervasive. Maurice Sendak called Johnson a “great, great original.”
Johnson himself was characteristically modest about the book. He saw it as a simple story for small children, not a philosophical treatise. The simplicity was the point — and the achievement.
Collecting Johnson
Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955, Harper & Brothers) in first edition with dust jacket is genuinely rare and brings $1,000–$3,000. The sequels are less expensive. Barnaby collections — the original Crockett Johnson two-volume set (1943, 1944, Henry Holt) — bring $50–$150. Johnson’s mathematical paintings are in institutional collections and rarely appear on the market.