Howard Pyle
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Howard Pyle was born at Wilmington, Delaware, on March 5, 1853, and died at Florence on November 9, 1911. He was raised a Quaker and trained as an artist, and he became the most influential American illustrator of his generation.
He taught, first at Drexel and then at his own school, and the list of people who studied under him includes N.C. Wyeth and Jessie Willcox Smith. What is called the Brandywine School came out of his teaching. He also did something unusual for an illustrator: he wrote the books he drew.
Why he wrote it
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights appeared in 1903, the first of four volumes he completed on the Arthurian cycle, the last published the year he died.
He worked from Malory and the older sources and rewrote them deliberately for American children, in a plain archaic English of his own devising, cutting what he judged unsuitable and keeping the spine of the thing. Because he wrote and illustrated it himself, the pictures and the words come from one man with one idea of what the stories were for.
The book we publish, and why
We publish The Story of King Arthur and His Knights in hardcover.
The subject is a code and what it costs to keep. Oaths given and held when holding them is expensive, courage that is not the same thing as fearlessness, and mercy extended to a man you have beaten. Pyle is not sentimental about it. Knights in his telling fail the code regularly, and the failures are shown.
The benefit is that a child finishes it knowing what he would be willing to stand for, which is a question most children are never actually asked.
How to read it with a child
Read aloud from about seven, independently from about nine or ten. The archaic English is the obstacle, and it is worth pushing through, because children acclimatize to it within a chapter and their ear is better for it afterwards.
The pictures are not decoration and should not be hurried past. Pyle designed the page as a whole, and a child who stops to look at the plates is reading the book as it was built.
The question to ask is specific rather than general. Not whether a knight was good, but what he promised, what keeping it cost him, and whether he paid. Children follow that with no difficulty at all.
Pair it with
- William Patten, Heroes and Heroines of Chivalry, which gathers the same tradition from a range of hands.
- The Junior Genius Method, our approach of Read, Notice, Write, Recite, Remember, Question, Apply. The Apply stage is where this book earns its place, because a code is useless unexercised.
- Andrew Lang, The Story of Joan of Arc, for the true story standing beside the legendary one.
His principal works
- The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883.
- Pepper and Salt, 1885, and The Wonder Clock, 1887. Original fairy tales.
- Otto of the Silver Hand, 1888.
- Men of Iron, 1892.
- The Book of Pirates, collected 1921 from work published across his career, and the source of most modern pirate imagery.
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, 1903, followed by The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, 1905, The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions, 1907, and The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur, 1910.
- Illustration for Harper's and other magazines across thirty-five years, and historical work including scenes of the American Revolution.
General reference on Howard Pyle. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Howard Pyle