The Stray Dog by Marc Simont

The Stray Dog by Marc Simont

"This picture book has all the earmarks of a classic. Simont gets it all right." --The Horn Book (starred review)

Caldecott Medalist Marc Simont's heartwarming tale of a stray dog is told with tender simplicity and grace.

When a little dog appears at a family picnic, the girl and boy play with him all afternoon, and they name him Willy. At day's end they say good-bye. But the dog has won their hearts and stays on their minds.

The following Saturday the family returns to the picnic grounds to look for Willy, but they are not alone--the dog catcher is looking for him, too!

Awards for this book include: Caldecott Honor Book * New York Times Best Illustrated Book * ALA Notable Children's Book * Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book * Amazon.com Editors' Pick * School Library Journal Best Book * New York Public Library's "One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing"

Marc Simont was born in Paris in the year 1915. His parents were from the Spanish province of Catalonia, and he spent his boyhood in France, Spain, and the United States. Simont considers his father to be his greatest instructor, despite later attending art school in Paris and New York. When he was nineteen, Simont moved to America permanently, aiming to support himself as an artist. In 1939, he created his first pictures for a children's book.

Simont has worked with authors as different as Margaret Wise Brown and James Thurber on roughly a hundred novels since then. Marc Simont's art is in collections all over the world, including the Kijo Picture Book Museum in Japan, where he won a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for illustrating Ruth Krauss's The Good Day, and the Caldecott Medal in 1957 for his illustrations in Janice May Udry's A Tree is Lovely. Marc Simont's art is in collections all over the world, including the Kijo Picture Book Museum in Japan. Simont has a grown son, two dogs, and a cat with his wife. They live in the Connecticut town of West Cornwall.

The Stray Dog is Marc Simont's most recent book.