The Biggest Bear
by Lynd Ward
Summary
Johnny Orchard wants a bearskin to nail to the family barn like the ones his neighbors already have, so he sets off into the woods to shoot a bear, but the bear he actually finds is an orphaned cub too small and trusting to shoot, and he brings it home as a pet instead. The cub grows fast and keeps growing, raiding neighbors' farms for food, breaking into a maple sugar shack, getting into more trouble than Johnny can control, until the neighbors' patience runs out and Johnny tries three times to lead the bear off into the woods and leave it there, only for it to come home each time. Told at last that the bear has to be shot, he takes it deep into the woods for what is meant to be the end, but before anything happens the bear catches the smell of maple sugar and blunders into a live trap set by men from a zoo, who take the by then enormous animal away to a zoo, where the book closes with Johnny visiting whenever he likes.
Lynd Ward painted the whole book in warm brown casein wash rather than the flat color or fine line common elsewhere in the medal's history, giving the woods and the bear a soft, almost sculptural weight that suits a story about an animal literally too big for the world Johnny has to fit him into. It was Ward's first picture book as both author and illustrator, after a career built on wordless adult novels told entirely in woodcut prints, and that background shows in how much of the story here is carried by expression and gesture rather than by dialogue on the page.
Historical Context & Significance
The Biggest Bear won the 1953 Caldecott Medal for a book Houghton Mifflin published in 1952. That year's runners up were Marcia Brown's Puss in Boots, Robert McCloskey's One Morning in Maine, Fritz Eichenberg's Ape in a Cape and Margaret Bloy Graham's The Storm Book, and Juliet Kepes's Five Little Monkeys.
Ward had already built a serious reputation before this medal for his wordless novels told entirely in sequential woodcuts, including God's Man in 1929, Madman's Drum in 1930 and Wild Pilgrimage in 1932, works aimed squarely at adults and studied since as an early form of the graphic novel. The Biggest Bear marked a deliberate turn toward children's work, and its ending, a captured wild animal delivered into permanent zoo life rather than returned to the woods, has struck later readers as more melancholy than triumphant; the book has been cited in scholarly writing on loss and mortality, including in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, an unusually academic afterlife for a picture book about a boy and a bear.