The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

He has so few words to play with that every one must count, and so it does. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is only 32 pages and 224 words long, but there is a reason one remembers it so vividly: the bulging salami, the lurid watermelon, the caterpillar itself, with its humpbacked body and impudent expression. The link between the deprivations of his early years and the slant of his artwork, so bursting with light and joy and exuberant colour, is such that, he says, if he had grown up in greater comfort he would probably be 'pumping gas' these days. The path from Carle's upbringing in Nazi Germany to the most beloved of children's authors and illustrators is one that, when he cares to indulge in self-analysis, he admits makes a certain sense. The other day, says Carle, he watched a big spider stalk a little one, before stepping in to save it. (This being a very nice part of the world, the neighbour is Gene Hackman.) The pool is set in a terrace of white brain coral frigate birds wheel overhead. They chose the area for the weather and the property for the romance of a little path that runs from the swimming pool through a tangle of mangroves to the water's edge, from whence the only sign of human life is the tip of a neighbour's jetty. 'One Sunday morning, the warm sun came up.' Returning to the books of one's childhood will thump you in the heart as much as anything.Ĭarle lives with his wife, Bobbie, in Key Largo, Florida, in a beautifully designed house they moved to three years ago from Massachusetts. Forty years after it was first published, The Very Hungry Caterpillar remains a bestseller, and although it's a quarter of a century since my dad last read it to me, when I tell him I am going to Florida to see Carle, he recites the first lines as automatically as liturgy.

His most famous book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, has sold 30 million copies, bringing his total to roughly 88 million, a fact that, in his 80th year, still amazes him. E ric Carle, the rock star of children's literature, has cobalt-blue eyes, gently accented English, and braces holding up his trousers, which together make him seem like a character from fable part Raymond Briggs' Father Christmas, part Pinocchio's father, Geppetto.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle