<\/a><\/p>\nThe books\u2019 appeal was far from universal. Some parents shied from the passage in the debut, \u201cThe Story of Babar, the Little Elephant,\u201d about Babar\u2019s mother being shot and killed by hunters. Numerous critics called the series racist and colonialist, citing Babar\u2019s education in Paris and its influence on his (presumed) Africa-based regime. In 1983, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman would call the books an \u201cimplicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an international situation in which some countries have everything and other countries almost nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBabar\u2019s history,\u201d Dorfman wrote, \u201cis none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries\u2019 colonial dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adam Gopnik, a Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker, defended \u201cBabar,\u201d writing in 2008 that it \u201cis not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n
De Brunhoff himself acknowledged finding it \u201ca little embarrassing to see Babar fighting with Black people in Africa. He especially regretted \u201cBabar\u2019s Picnic,\u201d a 1949 publication that included crude caricatures of Blacks and American Indians, and asked his publisher to withdraw it.<\/p>\n
De Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cecile de Brunhoff, a painter. Babar was created when Cecile de Brunhoff, the namesake for the elephant\u2019s kingdom and Babar\u2019s wife, improvised a story for her kids.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother started to tell us a story to distract us,\u201d de Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014. \u201cWe loved it, and the next day we ran to our father\u2019s study, which was in the corner of the garden, to tell him about it. He was very amused and started to draw. And that was how the story of Babar was born. My mother called him Bebe elephant (French for baby). It was my father who changed the name to Babar. But the first pages of the first book, with the elephant killed by a hunter and the escape to the city, was her story.\u201d<\/p>\n
The debut was released in 1931 through the family-run publisher Le Jardin Des Modes. Babar was immediately well received and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more Babar books before dying six years later, at age 37. Laurent\u2019s uncle, Michael, helped publish two additional works, but no one else added to the series until after World War II, when Laurent, a painter by then, decided to bring it back.<\/p>\n
\u201cGradually I began to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it ought to be perpetuated,\u201d he wrote in The New York Times in 1952.<\/p>\n
De Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text to many of the recent \u201cBabar\u201d publications, including the 2017 release billed as the finale, \u201cBabar\u2019s Guide to Paris.\u201d He had two children, Anne and Antoine, but the author did not consciously write for young people.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never really think of children when I do my books,\u201d he told the Wall Street Journal in 2017. \u201cBabar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in a corner of my mind. I write it for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 \u201cBabar\u201d author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father\u2019s popular picture book series about an elephant-king and presided over its rise to a global, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98. De Brunhoff, a Paris native who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Key […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4577,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[329,895,2996,1980,53,2997,1986,1985,182],"yoast_head":"\n
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