“Life Story,” Virginia Lee Burton’s Picture Book for the Ages

Life Story involves an audacious expanse of time and space but its very definitely about our home.
“Life Story” involves an audacious expanse of time and space, but it’s very definitely about our home.

In 1962, Virginia Lee Burton, the Gloucester, Massachusetts, writer and illustrator of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” “Katy and the Big Snow,” and the Caldecott Award-winning “The Little House,” among others, published her final picture book, “Life Story,” a hardy, quiet work of genius that starts with the birth of the sun, proceeds through fires and ferns and glaciers, and ends with you, the reader, living your life in the present day. “Life Story,” a Wagnerian opera of a book with a Hansel and Gretel aesthetic, is not as famous, somehow, as “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” or “The Little House.” It can be maddeningly hard to find at average bookstores, but good ones have it and loyal fans value it. For children, “Life Story” is one of the first works of art or science that will attempt to explain natural history, contextualizing the dinosaurs, those megastars of kid-dom, in time and place among the stars and on the planet, and it does so with a humanizing artistic realism; the final section, fittingly and comfortingly, zooms in on life as we recognize it. Much of it depicts the world of a century or half-century ago, but compared with the Mesozoic it’s quite familiar.

Virginia Lee Burton grew up in Massachusetts and California; her mother was a poet and an artist, and her father was an engineer and a dean at M.I.T. She attended art school in San Francisco, then moved to Boston. She married the artist George Demetrios, and they moved to Gloucester and raised a family. There, in Cape Ann, Burton founded a textile collective, Folly Cove Designers. When she wrote books, she designed them in their entirety, from the typeface to the illustrations to the layout. After the failure of her first book submission, about a piece of dust, she learned to test the stories on her own children first. “Children are very frank critics,” she said.

Much of Burton’s work concerned nature and the passing of time, with subthemes of industrialization and urbanization. (The New Yorker wrote, of “Katy and the Big Snow,” “Another unusual picture book by this author artist, who is adept at personifying machines. Her new heroine is a beautiful red crawler tractor of many talents… Spirited, imaginative, and even somewhat informative about how city highway departments work.”) “The Little House” is about a thoughtful pastoral cottage that weathers many years, wondering about life in the city, until eventually a city grows around her. (More eventually, she is moved back to an idyll, where she remains.) The novelist Anne Tyler, who earlier this year cited "The Little House" as the one book that made her who she is today, once wrote in the Times, “When I see those words now (and when I hear them, murmuring across the decades in my mother's voice), I recall the feeling of elderly sorrow that came over me at age four. At age four, listening to ‘The Little House,’ I had a sudden spell of . . . wisdom, I guess you could say. It seemed I'd been presented with a snapshot that showed me how the world worked: how the years flowed by and people altered and nothing could ever stay the same.” The mood of “The Little House” hovers between cozy and elegiac, wistful and realistic.

In “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel, Mary Anne, who had contributed to the irrevocable remaking of the American landscape—digging canals, cutting through mountains for trains, straightening curves for highways, smoothing ground for airport runways, digging holes for skyscrapers in big cities—is displaced by newer shovels: gasoline shovels and their ilk. (A sign that says “No Steam Shovels Wanted” might prompt thoughts about waves of immigrants—including Mulligan, perhaps.) Joy is restored when they find a town-hall basement to dig, in a country town called Popperville; in the end, Mary Anne becomes its furnace, and Mulligan its janitor.

“Life Story” involves a more audacious expanse of time and space, but it’s very definitely about our home. Its opening pages introduce a cast of narrators (including an astronomer, a geologist, a paleontologist, and the author); leading animals (trilobites, cephalopods, sea scorpions) and plants (seaweeds, moss plants, ferns), and supporting players (protozoa, jellyfish, corals, brachiopods; worms, round, flat, and segmented). The Table of Contents is a playbill of sorts. Prologue, Scene 6 is Introducing Sedimentary Rocks. Act I, Scene 5 is Life in the Ordovician Seas. Act II, Scene 3 is Life by the Cretaceous Seas & Lakes. If you have an old one, as I do, there are nine planets, and Permian Deserts, and Prehistoric Man. If you have a new one, from 2009 or later, there are eight planets—Pluto, once spinning toward the edge of its page, has spun off—and a Permian Climate, and Prehistoric Humans.

The action unfolds in a theatre. On the left-hand page of each spread, text and single-color art, featuring galaxies, Gorgosauruses, or cross-sections of earth, swirl up toward a globe, locating each player in its context. On each right-hand page, a gorgeous full-color painting illustrates the action behind the proscenium arch. Burton’s style is like that of a bold, science-minded Grandma Moses with a keen sense of perspective; her dawn-of-time stuff has the near-psychedelic energy of van Gogh’s “Starry Night”; her dinosaurs have the monstrous drama of Zallinger’s “The Age of Reptiles.” At the beginning of the play, and the end, there are red velvet curtains. In real life, it would be a very challenging production.

“Eons and eons ago our sun was born, one of the millions and billions of stars that make up our galaxy, called the Milky Way,” it begins. It reads like a bedtime story; it is a bedtime story. (A comprehensive one.) “Our Earth is the third largest planet out from the Sun. It is not the biggest planet, nor is it the smallest, but to us it is the most important, for this is where we live.” This simple observation is a life lesson about perspective: “to us it is the most important” could be said of your home town, your neighborhood, your block. Children are beginning to understand home and how it feels, home versus the rest of the world. It’s a good stage of life to begin contemplating the planets orbiting the sun, the celestial neighborhood, our place in things.

Burton goes on to explain time, and the Earth’s axis, and to offer solid theories about how the moon came about—“But nobody really knows because there was nobody there,” she writes. As flaming meteorites from outer space bombard a “red-hot sea of lava,” we see fireworks over fiery mountaintops in a bright-red soup: a beautifully horrifying hellscape, necessary to create what we now inhabit. Reassuring us, as ever, is the proscenium arch, the sign that says “Scene 4.” Then: heat from the interior, metamorphic rock, clouds of steam hiding the sun; clouds, torrential rains, ocean basins filling, rivers, mountains, streams, sand, gravel, clay, sedimentary rock. Life! Tiny cells, microorganisms. Now we’re cooking. Sea plants, animals without backbones. Trilobites rule, and then their rule ends. Cephalopods show up. (“The name ‘cephalopod’ simply means ‘having feet on the head,’ ” Burton tells us, respectfully understanding what we will enjoy.) Squid, fish, and lichens join the party; eventually, vertebrates come to town. Creatures develop lungs and crawl onto land. Great swamp forests, proto-frogs, the Age of Plants. A mass extinction. Warming. Reptiles continue to “play the leading roles”; early mammals, and dinosaurs appear; a “few of the reptiles” return “to a life in the water,” she writes. (“Screw this,” I like to imagine them saying.)

Ah, the dinosaurs. Some of the herbivores among them, she writes, have “grown tremendous.” If you have an original “Life Story,” you’ll find your old friend Brontosaurus, the thunder lizard; in new editions, it’s an Apatosaurus, but I’m holding out hope for the Bronto's return someday. Mountains rise, seas flood the lowlands, flowering plants appear. Welcome, flowers!

“Life Story” has the beautiful effect, each time you read it, of making you appreciate and acknowledge each kind of life form in turn, and each kind of atmospheric and geologic force that contributed to its existence. A meteor kills the dinosaurs; their bones remain in our museums. Things get hot and humid, and dense forests cover the lowlands. Birds and mammals take center stage. Cooling, drying, grasses. More flowers. Very weird mammals, lumbering and snoutish. Things normalize, then get very cold. The Ice Age! Humans, playing a “very minor role,” doubtless are freaking out.

Humans are new to this story, Burton writes, compared with “the long length of time that all other Life had been present.” She tells us about cave paintings, fire, tools. The humans learn to grow plants and domesticate animals. Soon enough we’ve got villages, towns, ships, languages, the Old World and the New World. We see teepees, Native Americans in canoes, a Mayflower-looking thing in the distance. Uh-oh. Now the scene zeroes in on the New World, the life of the “settlers.” Not easy, she writes. (The locals would agree.) Burton writes, “When our great-grandparents were young, our country was mostly a farming country.” (Future editions could slap on a couple more greats.) Later, cities grew, and farms were deserted. This is where “The Little House” might begin.

As we proceed to modernity, the compositions of Burton’s paintings have fixed elements—a central curving river or a central curving driveway snaking off into the mountains. The setting becomes a farm, a farm with a farmhouse, a cheerful dwelling that remains the same from season to season as nature changes around it. This aspect is like a progenitor to Richard McGuire’s “Here,” published last year, which examines a house in the woods from decade to decade, inside and out, human and material, deep into the past and far into the future; where McGuire’s book is adult and psychological, Burton’s is child-focussed and geological.

A tender painting shows a young family standing in front of a wild lot. “Twenty-five summers have passed quickly since we bought the old orchard, meadow, and woodland and moved a little house and my barn studio into the middle of it,” Burton writes. (This is life in Folly Cove, though she doesn’t explicitly say so.) She paints the house and orchard in fall, winter, and spring, in pinks, indigos, and spring green, describing the frost, the leaves, the evergreens, the migrating birds, days growing longer and shorter, thaw, buds, rising sap. In spring, lichens, liverworts, ferns, and mosses, those primordial Act I scene-stealers, return to the stage.

As the book ends, night falls—Burton looks up at the Big Dipper, the Milky Way, the hands on the clock—and a new day begins: dawn, a new baby lamb in the meadow, sunrise. The beautiful red velvet curtain is shown on the sides of the proscenium arch. “And now it is your Life Story,” she writes. You play the leading role. “The stage is set, the time is now, and the place wherever you are.” The endpages, a pen-and-ink drawing of people in a natural-history museum whose design evokes “Babar” and Richard Scarry and other delights, introduce comforting notes of urbanity and society, while reinforcing the wondrous lessons of the whole book—all of time and life—in a single spread. You close the book in a state of mild shock. How did she do it? How do we account for all of this glory?

Burton is a master of the curlicue, the sine curve, the zigzag; her colors morph from mood to mood, unafraid of darkness and drama. As the story proceeds through time, the contrast of dark and light almost evokes American Romantic painting. But her style is more like sophisticated folk art, her line drawings clear and intelligent, with hand-lettered warmth. Part of the brilliance of her style, and of the book over all, is that the coziness and domestication on the final pages, including in the Native American scene, includes and depends on the thunderous nature surrounding it and contributing to it. We couldn’t have the teepee and canoe or the farm and baby lambs without the sea of fire and the Ice Age. Between curtains, we observe and absorb the progression of time, the interconnectedness of life, of humans and animals, time and space and our place in the world.

“Life Story” is beloved, and, in predictable quarters, loathed, or even feared. A one-star review of “Life Story” on Amazon has the headline “Theory of Evolution Taught.” The reviewer, a kindly proponent of Scriptures and creationism who loves Burton’s other works, worries that children reading “Life Story” will learn that they “come from sludge and by chance,” and says that “no matter how sentimental or awesome the illustrations are,” the book might undermine how children view themselves, their worth, and the world they live in. Another, seeming to agree, replies, “After reading it, religious stories always seemed so ... small.” That makes sense. The Biblical world is a younger and smaller world than what we see in “Life Story.” Burton’s world—our world—is a warm, expansive universe, glorious and swirling and operatic and beautiful. Here, like a family in a Cape Ann apple orchard looking at the Milky Way, we feel awe and comfort at once—at home in a cozy speck of the galaxy.