Gyo Fujikawa
| Gyo Fujikawa 藤川堯 |
|
|---|---|
| Born | November 3, 1908 Berkeley, California, United States |
| Died | November 26, 1998 New York City, New York, United States |
| Occupation | artist, illustrator, writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Children's literature |
Gyo Fujikawa (November 3, 1908 – November 26, 1998) was an American illustrator and children's book author. A prolific creator of more than 50 books for children, her work is regularly in reprint and has been translated into 17 languages and published in 22 countries. Her most popular books, Babies and Baby Animals, have sold over 1.7 million copies in the U.S. Fujikawa is recognized for being the earliest mainstream illustrator of picture books to include children of many races in her work, before it became common to do so.
Gyo Fujikawa was born in Berkeley, California, to Japanese parents, Hikozō and Yūko Fujikawa (藤川幽子). The masculine name, Gyo (pronounced "ghee-o"), is after a Chinese emperor her father admired.
Gyo Fujikawa moved to Los Angeles to attend Chouinard Art Institute in 1926, having received a scholarship, and befriended Japanese dancer Michio Ito and many fellow Nisei writers and artists. After graduating and spending a year in Japan, she was on the Chouinard faculty from 1933-37. She worked for the Walt Disney Company in California as a promotional artist, before moving to New York in 1941. Fujikawa avoided the forced internment of West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II as she was living in New York at the time. Her family, however, spent the war in the concentration camp at Rohwer, Arkansas. From 1943-51 she worked for pharmaceutical advertising agency William Douglas McAdams.
In 1951 Fujikawa became a full-time freelancer, producing a dozen front-cover illustrations for Children's Digest and other periodicals, and about five years later was approached by juvenile editor Debra Dorfman at Grosset & Dunlap to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses". This was her first published children's book, in 1957. Babies, the first book both written and illustrated by Fujikawa in 1963, was also one of the earliest children's books to use multi-racial characters, a consistent feature across her body of work.
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