This is part 2 of Assignment 3, part 2. This is also for the "Features" section of the site.


ERIC CARLE


In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf.
On Sunday morning, the warm sun came up and pop! out of the egg came a tiny but very hungry caterpillar…


It’s hard to believe that The Very Hungry Caterpillar turns 40 this year, and its author – Eric Carle – has turned 80. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is still as popular as it was in 1969, and the caterpillar is still… well, very hungry!

One of the most common questions Eric gets from fans is: where did the idea for The Very Hungry Caterpillar come from?

There are many answers, Eric says. Some of the idea can be seen from when Eric Carle was a child. As a boy, Eric used to love walking in the woods with his father – and here, Eric learned to love bugs and animals. He says, "When I was a boy, my father would take me on walks across meadows and through woods. He would lift a stone or peel back the bark of a tree and show me the living things that lived underneath. These were very magical times and I think in my books I honour my father by writing about small creatures and the natural world. And in a way I recapture those happy times we had together." This love of nature is very clear in all of Eric’s books.

But ideas also come from just playing around. Eric says in an article from Scholastic that one day he was making holes with a holepunch and an idea came. "I playfully punched a hole into a stack of papers. I thought, a bookworm at work! Not enough for a book, but, nevertheless, a beginning." This developed into a book about a worm called Willi. It was Eric’s editor, though, who first gave him the idea for writing a story about a caterpillar, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar was born.

Today, the book has sold 29 million copies and is translated into 47 languages! The Telegraph notes that Eric has also written or illustrated over 70 picture books. These include The Very Busy Spider, The Very Quiet Cricket, Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See, and The Mixed-Up Chameleon.

But The Very Hungry Caterpillar will probably always be his best-known book.

"My friends, my family, my editors, my publisher, we all wondered why it's been so successful," Eric told Newsweek. "It is a book about hope. If you're an insignificant caterpillar, you can grow up to be a big butterfly in the world."

If you haven’t yet been introduced to Eric Carle’s delightful illustrations and wonderful storytelling, now is the time to start!


Click here to watch a video of Eric Carle talking about his books!
Click here to buy this book now from Amazon.com