Children's Author Dared to Depict Multiracial World

Long before multiculturalism was trendy, her children's books featured cherubic white, black and Asian faces. When it was unknown in the trade for children's authors to receive anything but a modest lump sum for their work, she garnered a contract for royalties. And when her publisher was skeptical of a book about babies, she forged ahead, creating a slim volume depicting everyday moments in the lives of infants that, 35 years later, remains an all-time children's bestseller--ahead of Bennett Cerf's "Book of Riddles" and Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Gyo Fujikawa died on Thanksgiving Day in New York at age 90. She was not the household name that Cerf was in his time or Dahl still is today. But her stories and trademark illustrations of round-faced wee ones with black dots for eyes are familiar to generations of parents and children.

Born in Berkeley and trained at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now CalArts), Fujikawa wrote 46 books and illustrated nine others, including the 1957 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses." She also designed six U.S. postage stamps, including last year's 32-cent, self-adhesive yellow rose stamp.

As an illustrator, she was devoted to detail, a trait she developed during two years as an artist in Disney's promotions department. Whether in her softly hued watercolors or black-and-white line drawings, she packed in plenty: Everywhere are tots frolicking, cuddling or doing something naughty, sticking fingers in jam jars or tugging a leopard's tail.

"Children want facts," Fujikawa once told an interviewer. "[W]hen many things are mentioned, I include them all in the art because I know children sit and look for them when the stories are read."

In her first two books, "Babies" and "Baby Animals," she proposed showing "an international set of babies--little black babies, Asian babies, all kinds of babies." But this was the early 1960s and a sales executive at Grosset & Dunlap told her to take the black babies out for fear they would kill sales in the South.

Fujikawa, a diminutive, elegant but feisty woman, refused. Today the books have sold more than 1.5 million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages. She is often credited as the first children's author to depict a multiethnic cast of characters.