SOURCE CITATION
"Robert (Norman) Munsch." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph provided by Scholastic Inc.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Whether it is in front of a small audience of children at a day-care center or a large concert hall filled with parents and their kids, Robert Munsch has delighted both young and old since the early 1970s with his performances of original stories for the young. Now a best-selling Canadian author, Munsch has collected many of his stories in a number of well-received books and has also recorded several of his favorites tales. Using a combination of humor, repetition, and appealing child characters, his "work shows a mastery of the form of the picture book as a small dramatic script," said Horn Book contributor Sarah Ellis. "His picture books work well with a single child or a beginning reader, but their great delight is discovered in reading them aloud to groups."
"Munsch's path to storytelling was far from direct. At first, he had planned to become a Roman Catholic priest; toward that end he studied seven years with the idea that he would eventually be an anthropological missionary. But, Munsch commented in Canadian Children's Literature, "I . . . made the mistake of taking a part-time job in a day-care centre. I liked the kids better than anthropology. Maybe that was because I came from a family of nine children. I went through a series of jobs with young children (day-care, infant day-care, nursery school and an orphanage). Along the way I picked up a degree in childhood education."
"In his work with children, Munsch discovered that he had a natural gift for entertaining them with stories he made up as he told them. His first improvised story, Mortimer, originally started out as a song accompanied by Munsch and his audience rattling containers filled with corn. The song goes like this: "Clang, clang, rattle bing bang/Gonna make my noise all day./Clang, clang, rattle bing bang,/Gonna make my noise all day." The story is about a little boy who refuses to go to sleep despite the efforts of his entire family, his neighbors, and even the police to make him go to bed. In the end he falls asleep out of pure exhaustion.
"Munsch did not write down Mortimer for some time. Instead, other day-care workers heard about and memorized the story so that they could tell it to their own children. It was not until Munsch took a job at the University of Guelph that he was urged by the director of his department to try and publish his writing. Munsch had a hard time writing Mortimer until he realized that he should write as if he were recording one of his performances. This made his writing sound more spontaneous and fun to read out loud. Munsch required a lot of feedback from his young audience, too. Only the tales that the children requested to hear many times were, he felt, good enough to publish. "I figured out once that the stories the children kept requesting came to two percent of my total output," he says.
"He mailed his stories to several different publishers, and two of his submissions, The Mud Puddle and The Dark, were accepted by Annick Press and published in 1979. Mortimer was not published until four years later. "Munsch's stories are mainly of contemporary, urban, domestic life, with a large dash of extravagant fantasy," Ellis observed. "They reflect a jaunty belief in the power of children. His protagonists, reminiscent of those of Marie Hall Ets, are strong, confident, and full of initiative."
"The Mud Puddle and The Dark show how children "are concerned about darkness, loss of security, and monsters," commented Carol Anne Wien in a Canadian Children's Literature article. "Munsch understands this. In each of his books he personifies one such concern. Once the problem is visible, it can, of course, be tackled." In The Mud Puddle a little girl fights off a bothersome mud puddle that keeps getting her dirty by dumping soapy water on it; the same little girl defeats a horrible monster that grows by eating shadows in The Dark. Another plucky Munsch hero saves his father in 50 below Zero when the father sleepwalks outside during a cold winter night.
"Some of Munsch's characters are spunky children who stubbornly refuse to do what is expected of them. Sometimes they defy their parents, as in Mortimer or Thomas' Snowsuit, in which Thomas resists wearing an ugly brown snowsuit, or I Have to Go!, in which Andrew will not "go pee" before his family leaves for a long trip. Other Munsch characters challenge authorities even more frustrating than parents, as is the case in Jonathan Cleaned up, Then He Heard a Sound; or, Blackberry Subway Jam. In this story, Jonathan has to fight City Hall to get the bureaucrats to remove a subway station from his living room. Jonathan is told by officials that the computer directed city planners to put the station there, and the computer, of course, is never wrong. But there are ways around such problems, and Jonathan discovers a solution by bribing an official with several cases of homemade blackberry jam.
"Munsch likes to throw in words like "pee" and "underwear" in stories like I Have to Go! because they amuse his young audiences. In Good Families Don't, which some reviewers criticized for its content, young Carmen wakes up to find a huge fart on her bed. No one can rid the house of it until Carmen has a bright idea: she chases away the fart with a rose. Throughout the story, Munsch makes the subtle observation that although we are taught that nice people don't expel gas, the truth is that they do. Writing in Emergency Librarian, Shirley Lewis stated, "This book is no masterpiece, but . . . I have to admit that I DID find it funny, and I have certainly noticed that from the moment the book arrived, everyone who had access to it went to the shelf and read it--often aloud--and laughed their heads off." Munsch told Ann Vanderhoof in Quill and Quire that his works are "middle-of-the-road taboo," adding: "Farts are perfect; You're not supposed to talk about them, but they're not very threatening. If you tell stories about sex, for example, young children find that too threatening."
"Other Munsch stories challenge different conventions. In The Paper Bag Princess, a gently feminist tale, Princess Elizabeth saves Prince Ronald from a dragon only to hear the ungrateful prince complain that she looks messy. Elizabeth decides he is a "bum" and refuses to marry him. Some critics have complained about this ending, calling it sexist. In another Canadian Children's Literature review, for example, Wien suggested that this "resolution in the story has a negative impact on boys; thus, it is sexist." Other critics, however, believed that Munsch offers a delightful twist to the traditional Prince-rescues-Princess story. Canadian Children's Literature reviewer Joan McGrath, for one, wrote: "Munsch's celebrated Paper Bag Princess is . . . becoming a cult-heroine for the skipping-rope set."
"Munsch usually spends up to three years retelling and revising his stories in front of audiences before he writes them down, but with Jonathan Cleaned Up he began writing down some stories--or parts of them--without performing them first. Another change in Munsch's books at that time was, as Ellis remarked, a movement "toward a more classic picture-book style." More recent books like Millicent and the Wind and Love You Forever--Munsch's most successful book, which has sold over four million copies--are more "ambitiously produced" and, as Gwyneth Evans observed in Canadian Children's Literature, Millicent and the Wind is "more gentle, evocative, and poetic than (Munsch's) previous books." Millicent and the Wind is about a lonely girl who finds a new friend when the wind carries a child to Millicent's isolated mountain home. Love You Forever, the tale of one mother's unending love for her son, is also "quieter and more introspective" than earlier books, according to Andre Gagnon in Canadian Materials. However, the author returned to more rollicking, humorous stories with books like Moira's Birthday, in which Moira invites her whole school to her house for a party, much to her parents' dismay.
"Thomas's Snowsuit, a picture book published in 1985, is the first of Munsch's books to win a major prize: the Ruth Schwartz Award. The story is about little Thomas and his protracted battles with his mother, his teacher, and his school principal about having to wear his ugly new snowsuit. Calling the book a "story of an adult/child confrontation with a difference," Patricia Sentance concluded in Canadian Materials that "this little satire (is) sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to satisfy adults and kids. Fans of Robert Munsch will not be disappointed by his latest book."
"In Munsch's well-known Love You Forever, the author shows how the power of unconditional parental love is transmitted from generation to generation. A mother holds her infant son and sings him a song that includes the title refrain. As the boy grows into manhood, his mother continues to sing this song to him; after he moves away, she even climbs into the window of his house in order to rock the sleeping man in her arms. When the day comes that the mother is too old and sick to sing to her son, the roles are reversed. The son holds his ailing mother and rocks her while singing the familiar lullaby. The book's concluding pages show the son returning home, picking up his baby daughter, and singing to her, thus beginning the cycle again.
"Based on a song Munsch created for his two stillborn children, Love You Forever is regarded as a departure for its author; the book is considered more serious and introspective than Munsch's usual light-hearted writings. The book is also acknowledged for introducing the concepts of aging and death in an unobtrusive manner. Though the book is generally praised as a sensitive and heartwarming work, some critics consider it a maudlin, manipulative piece with little child appeal. However, many observers find Love You Forever effective and reassuring, and Munsch considers it his best book. It has sold more than eighteen million copies since its publication.
"During the 1990s, Munsch regularly introduced multicultural protagonists into his works. In Where Is Gah-Ning? the author features a Chinese-Canadian girl who wants to go to a nearby town on the Trans-Canada highway. Although her father refuses, Gah-Ning finds a way to achieve her goal: she floats to town on three hundred balloons. Munsch's first nonfiction title, From Far Away, for which he collaborated with Saoussan Askar, outlines how six-year-old Saoussan and her family left war-torn Beirut to join her family in Canada. Munsch describes how Saoussan overcomes initial difficulties with culture and language to become the best reader and speller in her class. In Ribbon Rescue, Jillian, a little Mohawk girl, goes to a wedding attired in the traditional ribbon dress that her grandmother made for her. While she waits for her mother, Jillian helps the wedding guests by using the long ribbons that decorate her dress. Due to her helpfulness, she is invited to be the flower girl in the wedding.
"While Munsch's written works have been successful, Munsch has never stopped telling stories in front of live audiences. For awhile Munsch performed in front of crowds as large as three thousand people. But in 1987, when his schedule became too hectic, he went back to being a storyteller for day-care centers, libraries, and schools, usually working for free; he also teaches workshops for adults and teenagers on how to be a storyteller. Much to the dismay of teachers and librarians, who have tried booking him in advance, Munsch does his free storytellings with little or no advance notice, often simply showing up at the front door and asking to tell stories.
UPDATES
February 2004: Munsch's book, Smelly Socks, was published. Source: EdutainingKids.com, www.edutainingkids.com, February 1, 2004.
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born June 11, 1945, in Pittsburgh, PA; immigrated to Canada; naturalized citizen, 1983; son of Thomas John (a lawyer) and Margaret (a homemaker; maiden name, McKeon) Munsch; married Ann Beeler (a university educator), January 22, 1973; children: Julie, Andrew, Tyya. Avocation: Cycling, geology. Education: Studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood for seven years; Fordham University, B.A., 1969; Boston University, M.A., 1971; Tufts University, M.Ed., 1973. Memberships: Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), Canadian Association of Children's Authors, Illustrators, and Performers, Writers Union of Canada. Addresses: Office--Bob Munsch Enterprises, 15 Sharon Pl., Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1H 7V2.
CAREER
Storyteller and author of books for children. Bay Area Childcare, Coos Bay, OR, teacher, 1973-75; University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, head teacher at Family Studies Laboratory Preschool and assistant professor, 1975-84. Full-time writer, 1984--. Founder of Bob Munsch Enterprises, Guelph, Ontario. Performer in storytelling concerts and at school visits, and speaker at keynote speaking engagements.
