Education: Critic’s Cricket

“About ten years ago,” says Author-Critic Clifton Fadiman, 69, “I began to get less interested in grownups and more interested in children.” A lifelong addict-pusher of good reading for adults (Book-of-the-Month Club judge, author of The Lifetime Reading Plan), Fadiman has now set out to hook the grade-school crowd. From his hilltop home in Santa Barbara, where he is also preparing a critical history of children’s literature, Fadiman is editing a brisk new magazine called Cricket.

Billed as the first literary magazine for children since the famed St. Nicholas faded away in the ’30s, Cricket (price: $1.25 per issue) mercifully does not talk down to its readers. It offers a good range of literate, mind-widening material—fairy tales, poems, tongue twisters, articles on space and sport. Illustrations are mostly in black and white. “There is no substitute for the written word and the well-drawn line,” says Fadiman. “We want Cricket to act as a neutralizer against the cheap, the sensational and the violent.”

In the first two issues, reprints of pieces by such authors as T.S. Eliot, Black Poet Gwendolyn Brooks and H. A. Rey (Curious George) outnumbered original contributions. But new material dominates the two most recent issues (November and December), in which the contributors include Novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer and the prolific children’s writer Elizabeth Coatsworth. Assisted by such diverse characters as the Unhappy King of Gargantak and the Two-Toed Tree Toad, Cricket has already attracted more than 100,000 subscribers.