More Than Words—
LEFT: Heidi, Jessie Wilcox Smith; RIGHT: Robin Hood, Howard Pyle
Illustrating Great Stories
Before the dawn of motion pictures, the only images attached to great
works of literature were the ones in the mind of the reader
—or the very few that were illustrated.
Our current culture is over- whelmingly visual, with tele- vision and movies account- ing for most of the narrative
stories we know. Since the time when
movies were invented in the early part
of the twentieth century, many classic
pieces of literature have been put to film
and indeed may have more of a follow-
ing than the original written work. Who
can read L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful
Wizard of OZ without envisioning Judy
Garland as Dorothy, a role she played in
the 1939 film? Or read Margaret Mitch-
ell’s classic of the antebellum South in
Gone With the Wind and not imagine
Clark Gable as Rhett Butler? Before the
dawn of motion pictures, the only im-
ages attached to great works of literature
were the ones in the mind of the read-
er—or the very few that were illustrated.
44;March;2013;•;The;Artistic;Homeschooler
books for adults that have masterful il-
lustrations that can also be considered
classic. For Alice’s Adventures in Won-
derland, the illustrator of the book’s
first edition was John Tenniel in 1865.
Sidney Paget’s illustrations for the
Sherlock Holmes stories were the most
widely recognized. The work of these
artists did much to increase the popu-
larity of these stories.
