![]() At the age of 29, with abortive careers as a musician and a teacher behind him, he was convinced that he had finally found his calling. The book was not particularly distinctive or even very successful ( Plunk, Plunk, Plunk, one critic called it), but it had earned some kind notices and emboldened Marshall to try again. The year before, he had made his debut as the illustrator of Plink, Plink, Plink, a brief picture book with a text by Byrd Baylor that genially instructed children in how to cope with their fear of the dark. He worked quickly, and a little nervously, because his career as a children’s book author was in a critical phase that summer. The dots were the eyes of a cartoon character, two almost invisible specks of expression in a creature that, as Marshall drew it, began to take the form of a gargantuan blob. ![]() ![]() Inside the house his mother was watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on TV, and the bickering, cynical voices of the movie’s two protagonists, George and Martha, intruded on his concentration. One summer afternoon in 1971, in the little town of Helotes outside San Antonio, a young artist named James Marshall lay in a hammock and drew two tiny dots. Read more here about our archive digitization project. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives. ![]()
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