Jean-Thomas 'Tomi' Ungerer ( German pronunciation: ( listen) 28 November 1931 – 9 February 2019) was an Alsatian French artist and writer. In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter from an earlier marriage to Miriam Lancaster three children from his third marriage a sister and two grandchildren.Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration (1998) His first two marriages ended in divorce, and in 1971 he married Yvonne Wright. His later books included 1985’s The Joy of Frogs, a comic sex manual for amphibians, and children’s tales such as 1999’s Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear, about a stuffed bear in 1930s Germany. Ungerer moved to Nova Scotia after his spat with the librarians and in 1976 settled in Ireland, where he died.

The book became a hit and spawned several sequels. He served with the French camel cavalry in Algeria and slowly made his way to New York, with $60 in his pocket and a “trunk full of drawings and manuscripts”.Ī meeting with editor Ursula Nordstrom, of what was then Harper & Brothers, led to his first children’s book, 1957’s The Mellops Go Flying, about a family of acrobatic French pigs. Ungerer failed his high school graduation exams – his headmaster was said to have described him in a school report as a “willfully perverse and subversive individualist” – and subsequently travelled to northern Finland. During the war years, he said he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and dig trenches for the German army, and he filled his notebooks with battlefield scenes. His father was an artist, engineer and designer of astronomical clocks who died when Tomi was three his mother moved the family to Logelbach, near the Alsatian city of Colmar. The youngest of four children, Jean-Thomas Ungerer was born in Str asbourg in 1931. In The Three Robbers I don’t use the word ‘gun’. “There should not be a limit of vocabulary. They understand adult language,” he said.

“They understand the world, in their way. He believed adults should accord children great respect. The Council of Europe named him ambassador for childhood and education that same year. In 2007, a museum dedicated to his life and work opened in Strasbourg, France. In Europe, his popularity soared he sold millions of books in Germany and France. He was then effectively blacklisted in the United States, with many of his books removed from libraries and lost to American readers until about a decade ago, when Phaidon Press began reissuing his work. Ungerer once attended a conference where angry librarians asked him why an illustrator of children’s books would also depict graphic sex acts.

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