She had heart problems, mentioned her husband, Leonard S. Marcus, a historian and authority on youngsters’s literature.
Ms. Schwartz made her literary debut in 1982 with the publication of the image ebook “Bea and Mr. Jones,” the story of a kindergarten-age woman who trades locations together with her father, reporting for work at his workplace whereas he, an promoting govt, goes to highschool in her stead.
The ebook landed a spot on “Studying Rainbow,” the tv present hosted by LeVar Burton, and marked the start of Ms. Schwartz’s lengthy profession in youngsters’s literature.
Over the subsequent 4 many years, she stored up a gentle output of books — greater than 50 in all — that showcased her narrative wit and inventive whimsy. The standard that the majority distinguished her work, nevertheless, was her sense of childhood, which remained undimmed regardless of the passage of time.
“I can’t consider anybody whom I believe understood and portrayed the day-to-day routines of households with younger youngsters with extra intelligence and pleasure,” Mary Money, the editor in chief of Vacation Home, one in every of Ms. Schwartz’s a number of publishers, mentioned in a press release after her demise. “Amy was an acute observer of all of the tiny particulars that collectively make up a baby’s life. Her fantastic books celebrated, laughed at, and supplied a lot perception into that existence.”
Within the ebook “Busy Infants” (2019), she documented the various ways in which infants fill their time — amongst them “visiting geese” and “enjoying vehicles,” “constructing blocks” and “eradicating socks.”
Her ebook “I Can’t Wait!” (2015), geared towards youngsters who had superior past baby- and toddlerhood to the extra mature years of preschool, explored the interminable marking of time that youngsters endure, usually with out understanding what they’re ready for.
In her “100 Issues” sequence — together with “100 Issues That Make Me Completely satisfied” (2014), “100 Issues I Like to Do With You” (2017) and “100 Issues I Know Methods to Do” (2021) — Ms. Schwartz helped youngsters scale that Mount Everest of early numeracy, 100, whereas additionally indulging their love of lists. (“100 Issues That Make Me Completely satisfied” included “hula-hoops” and “double scoops,” “Grandpa’s instruments” and “swimming swimming pools.”)
Amid the a whole lot of comfortable issues in childhood, there are additionally loads of arduous ones, and Ms. Schwartz acknowledged youngsters’s anxieties and embarrassments in books equivalent to “Starring Miss Darlene” (2007), about an ungainly hippopotamus who, in a single episode, is solid as “the Flood” in a theatrical staging of the story of Noah’s ark.
Fairly than sprinkling some water on the stage, as her position dictates, she by chance douses the front-row viewers. A porcine theater critic takes a shine to Darlene, nevertheless, and lauds the present for its “viewers participation.”
In her illustrations, Ms. Schwartz favored gouache, a type of watercolor, and pen and ink. The poet Eve Merriam, writing within the New York Instances, supplied a assessment in rhyme of the images within the ebook “Mom Goose’s Little Misfortunes” (1990), a collaboration between Ms. Schwartz and her husband:
Amy Schwartz’s photos are buoyant, up within the ethereal,
goofy, guffaw-y, by no means too scary …
the watercolors are vivid, there are white open areas
to go away laughing room for the fuming faces,
the merry mishaps, the clown-y rages.
One capsule grievance: not sufficient pages.
Amy Margaret Schwartz was born in San Diego on April 2, 1954. Her father was an actual property investor and author, and her mom taught chemistry at a group faculty.
The third of 4 daughters, Ms. Schwartz referred to as upon her reminiscences of her household for the amount “Annabelle Swift, Kindergartner” (1988), a couple of rising kindergartner and her worldly, smart older sister, who coaches her in what to anticipate.
Ms. Schwartz recalled that as a lady she was nearly at all times studying. “I developed the flexibility to learn whereas strolling dwelling from college,” she wrote in a biographical sketch, “in addition to that of studying aloud to my grandmother and silently studying forward, concurrently.”
She additionally confirmed an early curiosity in drawing, retaining a sketchbook and taking artwork courses on the encouragement of her mom. Her first illustrations have been birthday and vacation playing cards that she made for her household.
Ms. Schwartz studied drawing at what’s now the California School of the Arts in San Francisco, the place she graduated in 1976, based on an obituary printed in Publishers Weekly. She later took a course in youngsters’s ebook illustration earlier than shifting to New York Metropolis, the place she labored a clerical job whereas making an attempt to make her manner into publishing.
She started by providing her companies as an illustrator and began drafting story manuscripts as effectively after editors suggested her that she would have extra luck if she marketed herself as an creator and illustrator. She continued her research in youngsters’s literature at New York’s College of Visible Arts.
Along with working together with her husband, Ms. Schwartz collaborated over time together with her father, Henry Schwartz. Their books collectively included “How I Captured a Dinosaur” (1989), “Albert Goes to Hollywood” (1992) and “Make a Face: A Ebook With a Mirror” (1994). She labored with creator Eve Bunting on the 1984 image ebook “Jane Martin, Canine Detective.”
Amongst Ms. Schwartz’ newer books have been “13 Tales About Harris” (2020) and “13 Tales About Ayana” (2022), during which she chronicled the adventures of two youngsters in a various city neighborhood. Harris, for instance, makes use of sidewalk chalk to sketch a dragon whose tail is so lengthy that it stretches up and down the block.
In addition to her husband of 32 years, Ms. Schwartz’s survivors embrace their son, Jacob Marcus, of New York Metropolis; and three sisters.
Though she was roundly praised for her understanding of youngsters, Ms. Schwartz displayed an equally intuitive understanding of fogeys. She wrote one in every of her best-known books, “A Teeny Tiny Child” (1994), clad in her nightgown, in what she described as “one groggy stretch” in her son’s first weeks of life.
“I’m a teeny tiny child,” learn the ebook’s opening phrases, “and I understand how to get something I need.”
Elisabeth Bumiller, a Instances journalist who’s the creator of two books about ladies and moms, wrote in a assessment that her favourite illustration within the ebook depicted “a darkish and silent Brooklyn road, lit solely by the glow from the teeny tiny child’s home.”
“In a single window we see Mother quietly nursing, whereas in one other stands Dad, staring into the gap and looking out slightly ignored and perplexed,” Bumiller wrote. “New dad and mom will immediately acknowledge that blend of confusion, exhaustion and intimacy that comes with the two a.m. feeding.”
In “What James Likes Greatest” (2003), Ms. Schwartz captured a common expertise of parenting: the execution of a maximally stimulating outing, adopted by the invention that your little one was most entranced not by the wonders you had marshaled however slightly one thing you had scarcely observed.
The story, Ms. Schwartz mentioned, was impressed by her personal “countless quest to be the best mom,” and the way she was over and once more “humbled in [her] endeavors.”
She as soon as took her younger son to a sculpture backyard solely to search out that the towering works of artist Isamu Noguchi held little curiosity for him in contrast with the hilarity of her by chance turning on the windshield wipers of their automobile when it was not raining.
James, the character in her ebook, preferred the windshield wipers greatest, too.