Chanticleer and the Fox
by Barbara Cooney
Summary
Barbara Cooney adapts Geoffrey Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, one story from The Canterbury Tales, into a picture book built around Chauntecleer, a proud, splendidly feathered rooster who rules a farmyard of seven hens. He tells his favorite, Pertelote, about a dream in which a beast much like a fox threatens him, and the two argue over whether dreams warn of real danger or mean nothing at all. A fox, listening nearby, decides to test the theory himself, flattering Chauntecleer into shutting his eyes and stretching his neck to crow as grandly as his father once did, then seizing him by the throat and running off with him. Chauntecleer, thinking fast, turns the fox's own va nity against him, urging the fox to shout back at the farmers chasing them and boast tha t he has won; the moment the fox opens his mouth to gloat, Chauntecleer breaks free and flies to a tree, and the story closes with both animals a little wiser about the cost of listening to flattery.
Cooney illustrates it in stylized, carefully patterned pictures, with detailed borders and small ornamental flourishes around each page that Kirkus Reviews said show the influence of illuminated manuscripts rather than a modern picture book. It suits confident read aloud listeners around five to nine, since the vocabulary and the debate about dreams run more sophisticated than a typical folktale retelling, and it rewards a reader willing to slow down ov er Cooney's crowded, carefully patterned scenes of a working farmyard. Cooney follows Chaucer closely to the end, where the fox tries to charm the escaped cock down a second time before both creatures curse their own foolishness.
Historical Context & Significance
Chanticleer and the Fox, published in 1958, won the 1959 Caldecott Medal for Cooney's illustrations and adaptation. That year's Honor books were Antonio Frasconi's The House That Jack Built, Maurice Sendak's What Do You Say, Dear?, and Taro Yashima's Umbrella.
It was an early landmark in a sixty year career, 1940 to 1999, that produced roughly 110 books; Cooney later moved from her early black and white pen work, shaped by Hokusai and Aubrey Beardsley, into the acrylics and pastels of her color period. She won a second Caldecott Medal in 1980 for Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man and the National Book Award in 1983 for Miss Rumphius, a story she wrote and illustrated herself, making Chanticleer and the Fox the first entry in one of the medal's longest and most decorated careers.