Is This You?: Looking for Childhoods in the Ruth Krauss Archive

Ruth Krauss's capacity to express children's voices made her famous. She used their words and stories in her books, prompting Maurice Sendak—her collaborator on nine of these books—to praise her for respecting ‘the natural ferocity of children’. Though I too slip into the habit of lauding her capacity to transmit ‘real children's voices’ (in my biography of her and her husband Crockett Johnson), I complicate that claim in this paper. Drawing on my years of biographical research in Ruth Krauss's papers at the University of Connecticut, my interviews with adult children she interviewed, and a 2019 return visit to her papers, I attempt to disentangle the ever‐entangled archival research from researchers, archival practice from creative/scholarly work, and consider where voices of children might emerge amidst these entanglements. The Krauss archive is an ideal location for this inquiry. First, Ruth Krauss actually listened to children, took careful notes on what they said, and threw very little away. As a result, the University of Connecticut's archivists were able to save notebooks where she wrote what children told her, multiple iterations of drafts for her books, unused art by Maurice Sendak, and some original, handwritten work by children themselves. Second, along with Krauss's books' reception and perception, the books' diction and syntax also reinforce the idea that they are transmitting ‘real’ childhoods. In this sense, her work affords us an opportunity to consider how the artifice of authenticity helps and hinders our search for the ‘children’ in ‘children's literature’. Third, my examination of Krauss's archive—part of what Karen Sanchez‐Eppler (revising Stoler et al.) calls a ‘shift from a use of “archive as source” to an interest in “archive as subject” and a focus on “archiving as a process”’—also yields some lessons in how we may better ‘hear’ children from the past in our present‐day ventures into the archives of childhood. My paper is thus part mapping of a problem, part autoethnography, and part demonstration of an archival research practice that maintains an equilibrium between reflection and gathering .