Ezra Jack Keats, prominent children's picture-book author and illustrator, was born 11 March 1916, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin and Augusta Podgainy Keats. He is best known for his bold, beautiful, and honest interpretations of minority children living and growing in a mid-twentieth-century inner-city landscape. He attended public schools and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, but received no formal training in art.

Keats began to paint pictures at the age of four with encouragement from his mother. After he painted a village mural on the top of the white enameled kitchen table, his mother praised his work. Instead of destroying the mural by washing it off the table, Ester Hautzig records in a biographical sketch of Keats for Horn Book magazine (August 1963) that his mother took her best table-cloth, "covered the whole little mural and every time a neighbor would come in, she'd unveil...