Many young children love picture books because they don't have to worry about reading and comprehending so many words. Instead they can just look at the pictures and make up a story of their own, since pictures tell a thousand words. That is exactly what Marc Simont does in The Stray Dog illustrations. His pictures tell a thousand words.
             Marc Simont was born in 1915 in Paris. His parents were from the Catalonia region of Spain, and his childhood was spent in France, Spain, and the United States. Encouraged by his father, Joseph Simont, an artist and staff illustrator for the magazine L'Illustration, Marc Simont drew from a young age. Though he later attended art school in Paris and New York, he considers his father to have been his greatest teacher. When he was nineteen, Mr. Simont settled in America permanently, determined to support himself as an artist. His first illustrations for a children's book appeared in 1939. Since then, Mr. Simont has illustrated nearly a hundred books, working with authors as diverse as Margaret Wise Brown and James Thurber. He has illustrated such classics as Karla Kushin's The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, and Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great. He won a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for illustrating Ruth Krauss's The Happy Day, and in 1957 he was awarded the Caldecott Medal for his pictures in A Tree is Nice, by Janice May Udry.
             Internationally acclaimed for its grace, humor, and beauty, Marc Simont's art is in collections as far as the Kijo Picture Book Museum in Japan, but the honor he holds most dear in having been chosen as the 1997 Illustrator of the year in his native Catalonia. Mr. Simont and his wife live in West Cornwall, Connecticut with one grown son, two dogs, and a cat. Marc Simont's newest book is The Stray Dog, which took him fifteen years to find a way to share this tale as a pict
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