It’s the birthday of Ezra Jack Keats, best known as the author of The Snowy Day (1962), the first mainstream children’s book to feature a black child as its main character. When the book came out, children of color saw themselves positively portrayed in a beautiful picture book for the first time.

Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz in 1916 to Benjamin and Augusta Katz, very poor Jewish immigrants from Poland. The family lived in what was then the Jewish quarter of Brooklyn; his father worked as a waiter in a coffee shop. Keats’ mother encouraged his obvious artistic gifts, while his father mostly discouraged Keats from pursuing what he feared would be an impossible way to make a living. But he would give Keats tubes of paint, at the same time claiming that starving artists had traded him the paint for food. Keats didn’t realize how proud his father was of his talent until his father died of a heart attack and Keats had to identify the body: in his father’s wallet were newspaper clippings about the awards Keats had won. This was the day before his high school graduation.

Keats couldn’t afford art school, though he took classes when he could. After working various jobs, he joined the Army in 1943 and designed camouflage patterns. (Camouflage doesn’t just design itself. But to be honest, I kind of thought it did.) He studied art briefly in Paris and did begin to exhibit his paintings, but mostly focused on earning a living, doing illustrations for book jackets and for magazines like Reader’s Digest and Playboy. He never planned on doing children’s books but was approached by a publishing company to work on children’s books. He did many illustrations for other authors, and in 1960 finally published a book that he co-authored with Pat Cherr, My Dog Is Lost! The Snowy Day was the first book Keats did entirely on his own, and it brought him fame and the Caldecott Medal. Keats based the main character, Peter, on photos from a 1940 issue of Life of a little boy about to be tested for malaria. Millions of children have loved the book for capturing the joy of playing in snow; for some children of color, like American Indian author Sherman Alexie and black author/illustrator Bryan Collier, the book was life-changing.

Keats (in sharp contrast to certain other children’s book authors written about in this Almanac) loved children, though he never married or had children of his own. He went on to write six more books featuring Peter and a host of other books as well. He traveled widely and visited many classrooms and had many honors conferred on him, including having a roller rink named after him in Japan. Keats died in 1983 of a heart attack.

Have a beautiful Sunday, snowy or sunny or otherwise, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.