For context, four years earlier the picture-book Andy and the Lion by James Daugherty was published. The stories of both books are essentially tall tales, directly descended from the American oral folk tradition.Īnd then there is another layer of strangeness to this book. Indeed, several of the stories in the sequel, Centerburg Tales, are narrated by Homer’s grandpa.
The style seems stilted if you are expecting the neutral prose of a children’s novel but it clicks when your read it as someone spinning a yarn.
Homer Price is clearly the original for this genre - it involves a pet skunk, the clever solving of mechanical or scientific problems, small-town folksiness (McCloskey’s illustrations here evoke Norman Rockwell), and of course a boy named Homer.īut in other ways Homer Price is strangely different from the rest. The first of these books by nearly a decade was Homer Price (1942, by Robert McCloskey, better known for Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal). Homer Price, like his picture-book predecessor, Lentil, has the world well under control.In a previous post I wrote about the Inventive Small-Town Animal-Loving Boy Whose Name Begins with H. The puzzling problem of Michael Murphy's musical Mousetrap,Īnd the Great Pageant of One Hundred and Fifty Years of Centerburg Progress Week, The breathtaking suspense of "Mystery Yarn", The strange skulduggery of the Sensational Scent,
In six preposterous tales, Robert McCloskey takes a good look at the face of mid-western America with humorous and affectionate eyes. While Centerburg is not exactly nosey, precious little happens that the good citizens do not know.
They include Aunt Aggy and Uncle Ulysses, the Sheriff and the boys, Miss Terwilliger, Miss Naomi Enders, great-great-great granddaughter of Ezekiel Enders who founded Centerburg and who owned the precious formula for making Cough Syrup and Elixir of Life Compound. Homer Price lives two miles out of Centerburg, where Route 56 meets 56A, but most of his friends and relatives live in town.
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