A boy from Hamburg who loved animals
Hans Augusto Reyersbach was born in Hamburg, Germany, on September 16, 1898. He grew up near the famous Hagenbeck Zoo, and drawing animals became an early passion that never left him. He was a German Jew, from the same city and community as the girl he would later marry, Margarete Waldstein; they first met at her older sister's sixteenth birthday party.
Drafted in 1916, he served in the German army in France and Russia until 1919. It was in those years, out under the night sky, that he grew fascinated by the stars and frustrated by the way they were drawn in books. That small frustration would, decades later, become one of his most useful gifts to the world. After the war he studied, made lithographs and illustrated books, including a set of prints inspired by the comic poet Christian Morgenstern.
Brazil, marriage and Paris
Germany's postwar economy was in ruins, and in 1924 Hans went to Rio de Janeiro to work for a relative's import firm, a job he joked was selling bathtubs up and down the Amazon. In 1935 Margarete, who had left Germany to escape the rise of Nazism, arrived in Rio. The two Hamburg exiles met again, opened what is described as Brazil's first advertising agency, and married that same year. They shortened their name to Rey and set off for Paris.
They lived in Montmartre. Hans drew cartoons and Margret wrote advertising copy. A French publisher saw his animal drawings and asked him to make a children's book. The result, Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys (1939), included a small, impish monkey who stole the show. The couple decided he deserved a book of his own, and began work on the story of a monkey called Fifi, who would become Curious George.
In Paris Hans also published two wordless picture books with the London firm Chatto and Windus, Zebrology (1937) and How the Flying Fishes Came into Being (1938). Both showed his gift for telling a story entirely through drawings, a gift that makes the Curious George books readable even for children who cannot yet read the words.
Escape by bicycle
When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, the Reys, as Jews, knew they had to leave Paris. There were no trains or cars to be had. Hans assembled two bicycles from spare parts, and in June 1940, just hours before the city fell, the couple rode south. Among the few things they carried were the illustrated manuscripts of their children's books, including the monkey's story.
Hans kept a diary of the journey. On June 20, 1940, in Bayonne, near the Spanish border, he noted four hours of waiting at the Portuguese consulate. That day they received visas issued under the authority of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who defied his own government to sign transit visas for thousands of refugees. The Reys sold their bicycles at the border, took a train through Spain to Lisbon, sailed to Rio de Janeiro on the ship Angola, and reached New York in October 1940.
The journey was not without danger. Along the way French police detained the couple on suspicion of spying, two German-speaking strangers carrying bundles of papers. According to the finding aid for Rey's papers at the University of Oregon, they were cleared only after officers looked through their manuscripts and saw that they were children's books.
Curious George reaches America
Within days of arriving, the Reys took their manuscript to Houghton Mifflin in Boston, which accepted it quickly. Curious George was published in 1941. Because the Reys did their own color separations for the printer, Hans redrew the original watercolors in the bold, cartoon-like style that readers still recognize. The opening line introduced a good little monkey who was always curious.
The book was an immediate success, and six more original adventures followed: Curious George Takes a Job (1947), Rides a Bike (1952), Gets a Medal (1957), Flies a Kite (1958), Learns the Alphabet (1963) and Goes to the Hospital (1966). Hans mainly drew and Margret mainly wrote, but both said they shared every stage of the work. Early covers credited only H. A. Rey, partly because publishers worried about a glut of women children's authors; later editions corrected this and give Margret full credit. Each book has stayed in print since it first appeared.
Why George matters to children
Curious George is a story about a small creature who makes mistakes because he wants to know how things work, and who is always forgiven and helped by a patient friend, the Man with the Yellow Hat. Generations of parents have used the books to teach early reading, and generations of children have recognized themselves in George's mix of mischief and wonder. The books have sold millions of copies in many languages, and George has appeared in films, a long-running animated series broadcast for two decades on public television in the United States, and countless classrooms.
Curious George Goes to the Hospital was created in collaboration with the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. It follows George through an X-ray, an operation and a stay on a children's ward, and it has helped many young children face a frightening hospital visit with less fear. It won the Child Study Association of America's Children's Book Award.
Twenty books in six years
Curious George was only the beginning. Houghton Mifflin accepted four of the Reys' manuscripts within a month of their arrival in New York, and by the time the couple became American citizens in 1946 they had published some twenty children's books. Hans wrote and illustrated Elizabite: Adventures of a Carnivorous Plant (1942), Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World and Pretzel, about a long dachshund, written by Margret (1944). He also illustrated books by other writers, including Don't Frighten the Lion by Margaret Wise Brown (1942) and Katy No-Pocket by Emmy Payne (1944), a story about a kangaroo without a pouch that is still read today.
He made song books for small children too, such as Au Clair de la Lune and Other French Nursery Songs (1941) and Humpty Dumpty and Other Mother Goose Songs. Curious George Takes a Job was named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1960, an honor for books judged worthy to sit beside Alice in Wonderland.
A new way to see the stars
Hans never lost his wartime interest in astronomy. He thought the traditional drawings of the constellations, with their elaborate mythological figures that did not match the actual stars, made it almost impossible for beginners to find them in the sky. So he redrew them. In his versions, the stars of Leo actually form the shape of a lion, Gemini looks like two figures holding hands, and the lines connecting the stars make a picture that you can remember and recognize overhead.
He published his system in The Stars: A New Way to See Them (1952) and a simpler version for children, Find the Constellations. His diagrams were widely adopted and appear in other guides, such as Donald Menzel's Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. Both books are still in print, updated in 2008 with current measurements and Pluto's new status. Countless amateur astronomers, scout troops and families have learned the night sky through Rey's shapes.
Find the Constellations followed in 1954. Rey's approach was praised by both amateur and professional astronomers, and it has outlived many more technical guides. It rests on a simple idea that teachers still use: people remember what they can picture. A child who has once seen Rey's lion in the sky can find Leo again on any clear spring night, anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
Jewish background
H. A. Rey was born into a German Jewish family in Hamburg, and his wife Margret came from the same Hamburg Jewish community. History.com and Wikipedia both describe the couple as German Jews, and it was because they were Jews that they fled Paris ahead of the German army in 1940. Their escape was made possible by one of the great acts of rescue of the war: the visas issued in defiance of orders by the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, whom Yad Vashem later honored as Righteous Among the Nations.
Cambridge years and legacy
The Reys became American citizens in 1946 and in 1963 moved to a house near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Hans read to children and continued to draw and stargaze. He died there on August 26, 1977. Margret carried on their work for almost two more decades, and on her death the couple's entire literary estate went to the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, where more than 300 boxes of their papers are available to researchers.
Their papers are spread across the country. The University of Oregon holds Rey's correspondence with his American and British publishers from 1940 to 1961. The Mississippi collection began in 1966, when the librarian Lena de Grummond wrote to the Reys and they sent her a pair of sketches. In Cambridge, friends of the couple opened a Curious George children's bookstore in Harvard Square in the 1990s, and a Curious George store still operates in the city.
H. A. Rey's legacy is unusually wide for an illustrator. A monkey he and his wife carried out of occupied France has taught millions of children to read and to be curious about the world, and the star shapes he drew have taught millions more to look up and name what they see. Both gifts were made for ordinary people, and both are still in use every day.
Sources & further reading
Curious George co-creator Margret Rey dies, History.com · Rey family, Sousa Mendes Foundation · Guide to the H. A. Rey Papers, University of Oregon (Archives West) · Rey, Margret (1906–1996), Encyclopedia.com (Women in World History) · H. A. Rey, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.