Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep by Ludwig Bemelmans

Bemelmans was a genial satirist and lover of life, but a serious intent often underlay his humor, especially in his novels. At the time of his death he was working on the story of his childhood. He described his life as a restaurateur in Life Class and Hotel Splendide, his travels to Ecuador and Italy in The Donkey Inside and Italian Holiday, and his stint as a Hollywood screenwriter in the novel Dirty Eddie. Bemelmans claimed to have no imagination, and all his books were the more or less direct product of his experience. Madeline's Rescue, the second book in the series, was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1953. The inspired amateurishness of the illustrations and the sophisticated doggerel verses have been an influence on later juvenile literature. Indeed, the Madeline books, of which there were five, remain the work that Bemelmans is primarily remembered for. His greatest success, however, was Madeline, a rhymed picture book about a Parisian schoolgirl who becomes the envy of her classmates when her appendix is removed. Hansi, the first of Bemelmans' fifteen books for children, beguiled most reviewers with its simple watercolor illustrations and nostalgic story of two children and their dog in the Austrian Tyrol.

Eventually he opened his own restaurant only in 1934 did he turn to writing, at the suggestion of a friend in publishing who, noticing the whimsical paintings with which he covered the walls of his apartment, urged him to undertake a children's book. Having worked his way up to a position as a waiter at the Ritz-Carlton, he left to enlist in the United States Army in 1917. In 1914, he arrived in New York with letters of introduction to managers of several large hotels. Ludwig Bemelmans (April 27, 1898-October 1, 1962), Austro-American essayist, humorist, novelist, artist, and author of books for children, was born in Meran, in the Tyrol, in territory that was then Austrian and is now Italian.

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep by Ludwig Bemelmans