A Second Career and Chester

A New Beginning in the Garage

Bill left depressed, burying himself in illustrating his sixth book, Randy’s Dandy Lions. He already had five books in print; freed from the studio, he poured himself into picture books from his garage studio. He now answered to “the editor’s opinion back in Boston,” Walter Lorraine at Houghton Mifflin, but “first of all I had to please myself, enjoy the work, and write stories about things I liked to draw.”

Chester, a Hidden Self-Portrait

His next book, Chester the Worldly Pig, he later revealed to be a hidden self-portrait. Chester’s “unhappy beginning in the pigpen compares to my poor beginning in Indianapolis”; his escape down the railroad “is my trip out west to Walt Disney’s big top”; the clown who dresses him in baby clothes “is Walt Disney, the master showman”; and Chester’s eventual fame as the “One and Only Worldly Pig” mirrors the recognition Bill won for books “read by kids all over the world.”

A Book a Year

Over the next quarter-century he produced some 34 books: The Wump World, The Whingdingdilly, Big Bad Bruce, Cyrus the Unsinkable Sea Serpent, and many more. He never dumbed down his vocabulary, trusting context to carry hard words, and he personally answered thousands of fan letters with little drawings. The studio had paid him to think in pictures; now he did it for himself, and for the children who would carry his stories with them for the rest of their lives.