Children’s literature expert discusses how to instil passion for books in young readers

American historian and writer Leonard Marcus is widely considered an authority on children's literature yet he struggled to learn to read as a child. "I was very verbal, but I just couldn't figure out how to read," Marcus says.

A tutor recognised, however, that he liked to talk and had an extensive vocabulary, so she asked him to write something to read to her. "I wrote a poem, and since I had written it myself it was easy to read."

Since then, reading and writing have become an integral part of Marcus' life, and he has gone on to write several books on children's literature, including Show Me a Story!, Minders of Make-Believe; Storied City; and The Wand in the Word.

He began delving into children's literature when he devoted a senior paper to American children's books, a largely unexplored subject in the early 1970s, while studying history at Yale. The books were "reflections of ideas about the essential core of a child's nature", he says, and the different thinking they revealed was fascinating as a reflection of historical change.

That led to reviewing books for The Washington Post, The New York Times and later for Parenting magazine, for which he has written a column since its inception in 1987.

It has given him the opportunity to meet many leading picture book authors such as Robert McCloskey, Helen Oxenbury and Maurice Sendak, whom he describes as "irreverent". The author of the much-loved Where The Wild Things Are, Sendak "liked to say shocking things", which didn't come as a surprise, Marcus says. "You could see he had a rebellious nature."