Seuss’s nameless behatted cat.įorty-two years into his 6th year, Alexander may be having his busiest stretch ever-and Viorst may be, too. In terms of canonical stature, Alexander has taken his place alongside Eric Carle’s ravenous caterpillar and Mo Willems’s wisecracking pigeon, and maybe even Maurice Sendak’s Max and Dr. He talks realistically, too, in run-on sentences that jump from enthusiasm to bleaggh and right back, and he’s not shy about saying when his parents are annoying, or his brother is being rotten to him, or he’s bored-bored- bored! There are no talking frogs or anthropomorphic mice in these books, and more than 7 million copies of them have been sold. Alexander is the rare junior protagonist who reads like an actual bright kid, cranky and charming by turns. He’s been having a recurringly terrible, reliably horrible, no good, very bad day since 1972, when he slammed into the children’s-book universe with a whiny yawp. There aren’t many protagonists in children’s literature like Judith Viorst’s 6-year-old Alexander. The train home was slow and the man at the snack bar was weird and mean to the lady next to me. I thought I might meet her son Alexander or her other son Anthony or her other son Nick, but they were grown up and had to go to work. M y editor told me I could go down to Washington on the train and go meet Judy, and I bought a ticket and went, and I got to talk to her and her husband and we had lunch and they were really nice.
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