Hiawatha

Verses from Longfellow's epic poem, translated into Spanish, depict the boyhood of the Iroquois Indian, Hiawatha.

Full color. 32 pp. Ages 5 and up. Pub: 10/96.Weaving together the beautiful oral traditions of the American Indian into a grand epic poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha is a renowned classic. Now award-winning artist Susan Jeffers presents a stunning visual interpretation of Hiawatha's boyhood life. A Booklist Editor's Choice Book. A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Full color.

Publishers Weekly

The creator of this pop-up version of the classic epic poem should be commended for a well-intentioned effort, but the result is only somewhat palatableneither the paper engineering nor the realistic watercolor pictures can stand up to Longfellow's shimmering language. While a picture book version could have made the poem more accessible, this has only six spreads because of the production limitations. The pop-ups do not illuminate the poem for young readers, and older children may shy away from the format. All ages. (April)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was the most popular and admired American poet of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College, Longfellow’s ambition was always to become a writer; but until mid-life his first profession was the teaching rather than the production of literature, at his alma mater (1829-35) and then at Harvard (1836-54). His teaching career was punctuated by two extended study-tours of Europe, during which Longfellow made himself fluent in all the major Romance and Germanic languages. Thanks to a fortunate marriage and the growing popularity of his work, from his mid-thirties onwards Longfellow, ensconced in a comfortable Cambridge mansion, was able to devote an increasingly large fraction of his energies to the long narrative historical and mythic poems that made him a household word, especially Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863, 1872, 1873). Versatile as well as prolific, Longfellow also won fame as a writer of short ballads and lyrics, and experimented in the essay, the short story, the novel, and the verse drama. Taken as a whole, Longfellow’s writings show a breadth of literary learning, an understanding of western languages and cultures, unmatched by any American writer of his time.
Susan Jeffers is the illustrator of such distinguished picture books as Three Jovial Huntsmen, a Caldecott Honor book; Rachel Field's Hitty; and the ABBY Award-winning Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, which was also a New York Times besteller. She lives in New York.