Images courtesy Erin Stead
This week Mark Twain has a new book out.
Yes, we know. He's been dead for more than a century, but that hasn't stopped him — or more accurately, his collaborators — from publishing a children's book, called The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine. It's based on 16 pages of notes, handwritten by Twain and discovered in an archive, in Berkeley, Calif.
Philip and Erin Stead took it from there; the Caldecott Award-winning author-illustrator duo picked up Twain's trail and finished the story.
"It was never entirely clear to us if there was never an ending, or if Twain just never got around to writing it down," Philip Stead says. "That said, we had to make a book, so we had to provide an ending to the story."
So the Steads left their own mark on the story, changing some of the original's magical animals — and making the young hero, Johnny, black.
See their conversation with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly here.
-- Petra
