In 1961, Ronnie Solver lived with his partner Jean-Merrill on the north side of Tompkins Square Park in East Village, Manhattan, with immigrants and Bohemians who defined the small towns of the neighboring idyllic metropolis. .. atmosphere.
When the city’s park bureau announced plans to tear many of the park benches, chess tables, and centuries trees to create space for a softball field. Neighbor stood up in oppositionWrote a letter, organized a protest, and formed the Tompkins Square Park Conservation Committee.
They won the battle, at least in part. By doing so, illustrator Solbert and writer Merrill began writing young adult novels as Solbert. I explained to The Valley News in 2014. A newspaper covering parts of Vermont and New Hampshire (she had moved to Vermont by then). The two have already published several books together and will work together on a total of 18 books, but the “Push Kart War” published in 1964 was their greatest achievement.
The story revolves around a shabby band of wheelbarrow vendors fighting a fleet of trucks hijacking narrow streets by attacking enemy vehicles with peashooters. In the modern parable of the vulnerable undertaking bullies, it quickly found millions of readers.
Solbert, who died on June 9, at the age of 96, was not widely reported, but Merrill, who died in 2012, is the main author of the book. However, Mr. Solbert’s illustrations, like the New Yorker cartoons of Mid Century, are urban and emotional, and may have contributed to the rapid rise of children’s literature to the Pantheon.
Her niece, Lisa Solbert Sheldon, said Mr. Solbert had died at her home in Randolph, Vermont. There, she and Merrill moved in 1970.
Among the many fans of “The Pushcart War” was the playwright Tony Kushner. He hoped to adopt it as a script at some point, and later wrote a Blurb for the 2014 edition of The New York Review of Books.
“This book has given me a gateway to a world of political and economic injustice and resistance to fraud, my first imagination,” Kushner wrote. “As it can and should be, even non-violent civil disobedience, opposition, fun, correct, necessary, heroic, and even as helpless as a child. I saw.”
Romaine Gustav Solbert, who attended the childhood nickname Ronnie, was born on September 7, 1925 in Washington. Her family quickly moved to Rochester, New York. There, her father, Oscarna Saniel Solver, was the first director of the George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film. Her mother, Elizabeth (Abernathy) Solbert, was a housewife.
Solbert graduated from Vassar College in 1946 and earned a master’s degree in art from the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Michigan in 1948. After working for several years in Sweden, where her father was born, she moved to New York City. Pursue her art career.
She followed two paths. She painted primarily in the veins of Abstract Expressionism and was quite successful, including 17 works in the “New Talent” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1959.
She also started drawing illustrations for children’s books. She met Merrill shortly after arriving in New York, and she released her first book, Henry the Handpaint Mouse, with her in 1951. They continued to collaborate on 17 more books, including the “Push-Kart War.”
Critics pointed out how much Solbert’s work enhanced Merrill’s text. Many tell complex stories about outsiders fighting bureaucratic fit.
Reviewing the New York Times’ 1969 book, The Black Sheep, renowned children’s writer and illustrator Natalie Babbitt said, “Jean Merrill finds it difficult with the help of Ronnie Solver’s careful, careless and swaying paintings. I praised the way it worked. “
Solbert also collaborated with other authors. She painted the poet Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Bronzeville Boys and Girls” (1956) and Align Harvard’s “Two Runaways” (1959). She also wrote her own three books.
Solbert and Merrill purchased a farm in Washington, Vermont in 1962. Eight years later, they left New York watching over their loved ones. Tompkins Square Park is devastated And the crime overtakes East Village.
“I realized I was spending more time solving the problem, but the problem was too big,” Solbert told Valley News in 2014.
In 2013, a year after Merrill’s death, Solbert, who had no immediate survivors, transferred his farm to the Vermont Institute for Natural Sciences and settled full-time in the small town of Randolph in the heart of the state. She stopped mostly drawing illustrations, but by then she continued her art, including photography and sculpture.
“Art is my sanity, joy, frustration, and passion,” she wrote in an artist’s statement. “My subject is human animals, our interrelationships, and our relationships with the world we live in. Works that invite reflection, broaden our perspective, and challenge the emotional and intellectual reactions of our viewers. I want it. “
