Ci5: Philip and Erin Stead on Their Adaptation of Mark Twain’s Unfinished Children’s Story

Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly version

In a featured talk at last week’s ABC Children’s Institute in Portland, Oregon, married author/illustrator team Philip and Erin Stead recounted their journey to adapt Mark Twain’s never-finished children’s story, The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, for publication.

Oleomargarine coverDoubleday Books for Young Readers’ release of the never-before-published story on September 26 will be a major event, according to Frances Gilbert, the book’s editor. At last Friday’s talk, Gilbert said that The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an unfinished, unknown children’s story from America’s greatest writer to be brought to life by two of the most innovative people working in children’s books today.” Gilbert, the associate publishing director for Random House Books for Young Readers, predicted that the book will be one of the hottest children’s titles of the fall and said that it would be bolstered by a strong publicity and marketing campaign before and after publication.

The 160-page book, which resembles a long-form fairy tale, stems from a story that Twain (born Samuel Clemens in 1835) made up to amuse two of his daughters, Clara and Susy Clemens, during an 1879 trip to Paris. The tale made its way to Gilbert in 2014 after the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which originally received the material from the Mark Twain archive at the University of California at Berkeley, contacted her to see if she wanted to pursue publishing options.

Gilbert had always wanted to work with the author/illustrator team responsible for Caldecott Medal-winner A Sick Day for Amos McGee; E.B. White Read-Aloud Award honor book Bear Has a Story to Tell; and Lenny & Lucy (all Roaring Brook Press), among other titles, so she sent the Steads her pitch. When they agreed, Gilbert forwarded them Twain’s four-and-a-half pages of typewritten notes and gave them free reign to create a full-length book.

Erin and Philip Stead with Frances Gilbert
Erin and Philip Stead with Frances Gilbert

“To me, it was all there,” said Philip Stead, who wrote the text for the new book. “Every plot point was essentially there. What was missing was the finished prose. So the journey of this book was how to complete it and how to make it something that would honor Mark Twain, but also something that you would recognize as coming out of our studio as well.”

“It was immediate pretty clear that this was a different type of project,” added Erin Stead, who was responsible for Prince Oleomargarine’s illustrations. “It was a really strange moment when we realized, Oh, we’re collaborating with this ghost… This is half his, half ours, so do we really have any right to do it? But we were asked, so you have to just say yes.”

To prepare for the project, Philip Stead said he read several volumes of Twain’s autobiography, as well as a selection of the author’s short stories, The Adventures of Huck Finn, and various primary sources. To Stead, the feeling of essentially being in a dialogue with a ghost actually helped inform his writing.

“We think of Twain as almost this statue from the past and not a real person, but for me, he had to become a real person in order to work on this thing in real time as a contemporary work of fiction,” Philip Stead said. “We had to find a way to do it that would feel like something that was current and honest and exciting.”

According to Philip Stead, the title character of Prince Oleomargarine is a bullying, misogynistic, xenophobic tyrant looking to expel a minority class from the land. While many people who have read the manuscript assume this character was modeled after Donald Trump, that assumption is incorrect, said Stead, in part because they started the project in 2014. The plot also centers around two main characters, Johnny and his daughter Susy, who is depicted as a kangaroo in Twain’s original notes, but which the Steads changed to a skunk. The cast of characters also includes a chicken named Pestilence and Famine, a group of Mormons, and the Steads and Mark Twain as themselves.

Erin Stead said she used woodblock cuts and a laser printer to create the book’s illustrations, a process that was not without a good amount of fretting.

“With a lot of research behind me, I had to let a lot of it go because I had to illustrate the story that both Philip and Mr. Twain wrote,” she said. “I had to figure out how to approach it. This took me forever, which made everybody very nervous. I really tortured myself about how I wanted to approach this manuscript.”

One of the overall driving factors behind the Steads’ interpretation of Prince Oleomargarine, said Philip Stead, can be found in Susy Clemens’ biography of her father. At age 12, Susy wrote, “I had wanted Papa to write something that would reveal something of his kind and sympathetic nature.”

According to Susy, Twain had come close to doing that in The Prince and the Pauper, but didn’t quite succeed. His compulsion to always be the funniest person in the room might have been one of his few weak points, Philip Stead agreed. In his writing, Twain didn’t often choose to lay aside his caustic humor and political satire to “allow a simple kindness to ring true,” he said, noting that Prince Oleomargarine is an attempt to create “what Susy really wanted from her father…which for whatever reason he just couldn’t give to her over 100 years ago.”