The Snowy Day
by Ezra Jack Keats
Summary
Peter wakes to find his whole neighborhood covered in the first snow of the season and spends the day outside on his own in a bright red snowsuit, dragging a stick through the snow to leave a trail, knocking snow off a tree onto his own head, making snow angels and a lopsided snowman, and packing a snowball he decides to save in his pocket for later. He is still a little too young to join the older boys' snowball fight, so he goes his own way instead, building and exploring by himself until he heads home tired and happy, only to find, checking his pocket that night, that the snowball he saved has melted. He dreams the sun has melted all the snow away entirely, but wakes the next morning to a fresh snowfall outside his window and heads back out, this time with a friend.
Ezra Jack Keats built every page from collage, layering patterned paper, fabric and cloth cutouts rather than drawing the scenes by hand, and he made a small stamp shaped like a snowflake and spattered India ink with a toothbrush to texture the snow itself. The result is flat, graphic and boldly colored, closer in feel to a paper cutout than a traditional storybook illustration, and it suits the very youngest listeners, toddlers through about six, since the story follows a single ordinary, joyful day with no real conflict beyond a boy being slightly too young for the big kids' game. It reads short and simply, more a string of small discoveries than a plot, which is exactly the length and pace very young children want repeated again and again.
Historical Context & Significance
The Snowy Day, published by Viking on November 5, 1962, won the 1963 Caldecott Medal, becoming the first Caldecott winning picture book with a Black protagonist. That year's Honor books were Bernarda Bryson's The Sun Is a Golden Earring and Maurice Sendak's Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. Peter's ordinariness was the point: the Baltimore Afro-American, in an early review, wrote that "the illustrations are so appealing and colorful you will long remember them," and Keats said he put a Black child at the center of the book "simply because he should have been there all along."
Later criticism complicated that reception. Nancy Larrick's influential 1965 essay "The All White World of Children's Books" argued Peter's mother echoed an old mammy stereotype, and some scholars since have faulted the book for showing no specifically Black culture at all; Keats, who was white, said Peter's mother was drawn from his own mother. The book has sold several million copies, was issued as a set of United States postage stamps in 2017, and Keats returned to Peter across six more books, from Whistle for Willie in 1964 to Pet Show! in 1972.