Ezra Jack Keats\nBorn March 11, 1916 – May 6, 1983\nEducation late 1930s took art classes when he could afford it; Studied Art in Paris in 1949\n\nEzra Jack Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz on March 11, 1916 in East New York, Brooklyn, the third child of Polish-Jewish immigrants Benjamin Katz and Augusta Podgainy. The family was very poor. Jack, as he was known, was artistic from an early age, and joyfully made pictures out of whatever scraps of wood, cloth and paper that he could collect. \n\nKeats attended Thomas Jefferson High School, where he won a national contest run by Scholastic for an oil painting depicting hobos warming themselves around a fire. At his graduation, in January 1935, he was to receive the senior class medal for excellence in art. Two days before the ceremony, Benjamin Katz died in the street of a heart attack. When Keats identified his father\'s body, he later wrote, \"I found myself staring deep into his secret feelings. There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won.\n\nHis father\'s death curtailed his dream of attending art school. For the remainder of the Great Depression until he was drafted for military service in World War II, Keats took art classes when he could and worked at a number of jobs, most notably as a mural painter under the New Deal program the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and as a comic book illustrator. At Fawcett Publications, he illustrated backgrounds for the Captain Marvel comic strip. He spent his military service (1943–45) designing camouflage patterns for the U.S. Army Air Force. In 1947 he petitioned to legally change his name to Ezra Jack Keats, in reaction to the anti-Semitic prejudice of the time.\n\nKeats spent most of 1949 painting and studying in Paris, realizing a long-deferred dream of working as an artist. After returning to New York, he focused on earning a living as a commercial artist, undoubtedly influenced by his father\'s anxieties. His illustrations began to appear in Reader\'s Digest, The New York Times Book Review, Collier\'s and Playboy, and on the jackets of popular books. His work was displayed in Fifth Avenue store windows, and the Associated American Artists Gallery, in New York City, gave him exhibitions in 1950 and 1954.\n\nHe won the 1963 Caldecott Medal for illustrating The Snowy Day, which he also wrote. It is considered one of the most important American books of the 20th century.\n\nKeats is best known for introducing multiculturalism into mainstream American children\'s literature. He was one of the first children’s book authors to use an urban setting for his stories and he developed the use of collage as a medium for illustration.\n\nHonors:\nKeats was the first artist invited to design greeting cards for UNICEF\n1963 Caldecott Medal for The Snowy Day\nmember of the White House Forum on Child Development\nawarded The University of Southern Mississippi Silver Medallion in 1980 during the Fay B. Kaigler Children\'s Book Festival as outstanding children\'s book author-illustrator\n\nonline gallery: http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/

Ezra Jack Keats History of American Illustration