Perfect example of someone suggesting a writer/illustrator I wish I’d thought of.
This is the correct answer. You can now close the thread.
All I gotta say is that its pretty easy to rhyme when you make up your own words. I’m looking at you, Dr.! Half them damn characters didn’t even have feet!
“Where the Wild Things Are” (or whatever that was) was always my favorite.
Van Allsburg is a great illustrator (though I prefer the more dynamic, overtly imaginative stuff of Dr. Seuss Sendak and the like), but his story-telling and writing voice are terrible - maudlin, uninspired, predictable and cliche (please envision a diacritical mark wherever you’d like to see one).
“Polar Express” was a bad movie because the idea was so thin and bland.
What does drawing backgrounds have anything to do with it? Solely from the point of view of the images on the page, he’s still way ahead.
I agree that Chris Van Allberg is also a great one.
And all Richard Scarry did was cute; his characters all looked the same and have no personality at all. He’s really the George Wunder of children’s books.
Definitely Seuss. He is definitely the most well known modern children’s author, and innovated the genre in a way that nobody else did.
Woo hoo - vindication!! Or something!!
That’s 2 votes for … well, 2 votes for whatever it was that I said. 
Thanks, Homebrew.
My absolutest favoritest ever children’s book was One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer. It was absurdist, had funny monsters with funny faces, and gave ridiculous a ridiculously complicated explanation for something as simple as sending a letter in the mail.
But it was the only Mercer Mayer book I think I ever read.
I also loved the Richard Scarry books — I pored over every page for hours — but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about any of the stories he wrote.
On the other hand, I can remember whole pages of text and illustrations from Seuss. In that respect, he made the greatest impression on me as a child reader.
Gotta give it to the doctor.
I remember liking Sendak, Scarry and Seuss. But as illustration I thought The Utter Zoo was the bee’s knees as a youngster, so Gorey has to get my vote.
- Tamerlane
Whoops, my bad. I misread writer/illustrator as either one or the other or both.
P.D Eastman, with this vote based solely and completely on the book, Go, Dog. Go!, which I forced my parents, uncles, grandmother and older sisters to read out loud to me over and over again when I was a child. I still recite “Go, dogs. Go! The light is green now.” at traffic lights.
Damn. I want a copy of that book to read now. 
Dr. Suess is second place, for Fox in Socks and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.
Dr. Suess, Mercer Mayer
But Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein on the alternate list.
In the night kitchen…
Scarry, but most especially the story Uncle Willy and the Pie-Rats.
I’m amazed there is any discussion on this at all. I had always taken it for granted that Suess is to children books what Hendrix was to guitar, Stanley Kubrick to film, Pele to football and Werner Klemperer to portraying bumbling Prison Camp Commandants. I really just consider him peerless and all those other guys who get mentioned, well, they are just guys who wrote a few books. I see now perhaps I was being a little insular.
Wow! Consider my eyes opened to the diversity of opinion in the world. Time, perhaps, for me to do some re-reading…
mm
Out of the four, I’ll go with Seuss, then Scarry. But my vote really goes to Sendak; Scarry is fun, Seuss is clever and fun, but Sendak is an artist. He also did more than 12 books, but since he puts huge effort into most of his works, he’s slower than the mass-producing Mayer and Berenstains. (But, I do love A boy, a dog, and a frog.)
However, my own true love is Edward Ardizzone. And Edward Gorey too. Oh, and Garth Williams. And especially Trina Schart Hyman, oh wow, she’s a goddess. And Lisbeth Zwerger!
Seuss is indisputably the top of the list, in any category in which he qualifies. Those thinking that he wasn’t any good with detail need to read Wacky Wednesday: The book is little more than a frame on which to hang the pictures, each of which contains a number of subtly wrong details. And even if one can criticize his drawing skills, his writing is more than enough to make up for it.
I’m not sure the Berenstans count, here… Wasn’t one of them the author, and one the illustrator? Just because they’re related (I’m not clear whether they’re married or siblings) and usually work together, does not make them one person.
Don’t judge Dav Pilkey until you’ve read God Bless the Gargoyles. He’s capable of a lot more than just Captain Underpants.
I recently went to a special Sendak exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art. I remembered Sendak only from Where the Wild Things Are and Really Rosie. I had no idea what a wide range of stuff he’d done – and how deeply disturbing some of it was. The plaques next to the framed artwork explained how a great deal of his work was metaphors about the Holocaust.
There was a whole room devoted to his work on a revival of the Holocaust-era opera Brundibar, originally produced at the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Technically true. However I’m a big fan of longtime collaborators and since they both wrote and were trained illustrators, I figured there’s so much creative cross-pollination to be considered as one.
I did not realize until i went to double check my facts just now that Stan Berenstain died last year at age 82.
He also wrote and illustrated the classic Are You My Mother?, but surprisingly he didn’t write many others, not making Askia’s cutoff. By the way, I like your hat.
I would like to throw into the ring Daniel Pinkwater. He must have close to 20 picture books, in addition to his classic young adult novels, such as Young Adult Novel.