Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other,” the daughter of its author, Arnold Lobel, said. “It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.”
,” about a man who becomes a zookeeper so that he can spend every day with his animal friends. During his career, he worked on dozens of children’s books, both as a writer and as an illustrator, and also, in some instances, in collaboration with his wife, Anita Kempler, whom he met while studying art and theatre as an undergraduate, at Pratt Institute.
The “Frog and Toad” books remain in print to this day, and still pop up on the bookshelves of young parents. I asked Adrianne, who now has a teen-age daughter of her own, why she thinks the two characters have such staying power. “It was the only thing he wrote that involved a relationship,” she said.
Adrianne suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other,” she told me. “It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne told me.
When reading children’s books as children, we get to experience an author’s fictional world removed from the very real one he or she inhabits. But knowing the strains of sadness in Lobel's life story gives his simple and elegant stories new poignancies. On the final page of “Alone,” Frog and Toad, having cleared up their misunderstanding, sit contently on the island looking into the distance, each with his arm around the other.
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