Madeline author ludwig bemelmans biography
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“Writing is always a dreadful, tiresome business and the worst of all tortures for me, because I am convinced that I am not a writer but a graphic workman, a painter who hangs pictures in a row, who collects imagery, and my problem is always to find one for a beginning and one for an end and then, something to hang in the middle so that it resembles a book,” said Ludwig Bemelmans (1898 – 1962).
Graphic workman, painter—whatever he called himself, Bemelmans belongs in the Pantheon of illustrators. A relentless connoisseur of life, he drew with a child’s eye and wrote with the shrewd wit of an adult. He knew everyone worth knowing, went everywhere worth visiting, all the while recording what he saw on the backs of menus, envelopes, or on the inside covers of matchbooks. His resume was a checkerboard: hotelier, restaurateur, cartoonist, ad man, theatrical designer, novelist, screenwriter, interior decorator, journalist, and children’s book author. What made Bemelmans such a crea
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The Hub
Ludwig Bemelmans, the author and illustrator of the Madeline books and an artist whose paintings often appeared on covers of The New Yorker (as well as on the walls of the Carlyle Hotel), did not begin a career in the arts until his 30s. Before the, he mostly worked in hotels, starting when he was a teenager in his native Austria.
Born in 1898 in the region of Austria that is now geographically Northern Italy, Bemelmans had a fairly unconventional life. He was raised by a single mother (his father, a hotelier and painter named Lampert, had left her while she was pregnant, and he had also impregnated Bemelman’s soon-to-be governess, abandoning them both for yet another woman). And after Bemelmans’ governess committed suicide shorty thereafter, his mother was left alone, at age 24, to raise her son.
As a boy, he frequently got into trouble at school, and when he became a teenager, his mother sent him to work for his Uncle Hans, a hotelier. The young Bemelman
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Ludwig Bemelmans
Austrian and American writer (1898–1962)
Ludwig Bemelmans (April 27, 1898 – October 1, 1962[1]) was an Austrian and American writer and illustrator of children's books and adult novels. He is known best for the Madeline picture books. Six were published, the first in 1939.[2]
Early life
[edit]Bemelmans was born to the Belgian painter Lambert Bemelmans and the German Frances Fischer in Meran, Austria-Hungary (now Italy). His father owned a hotel. He grew up in Gmunden on the Traunsee in Upper Austria. His first language was French and his second German.
In 1904, his father left his wife and Ludwig's governess, both of whom were pregnant with his children, for another woman,[3] after which his mother took Ludwig and his brother to her native city of Regensburg, Germany. Bemelmans had difficulty in school, as he hated the German style of discipline. He was apprenticed to his uncle Hans Bemelmans at a hotel in Austria. In a 19