Bridwell's idea: Thanks to the girl's affection, a puppy -the runt of the litter - grows into a klutzy but good-hearted behemoth, as big as the lighthouses on the author's imaginary "Birdwell Island." A nearby paint container inspired Bridwell to colour Clifford fire engine red.īridwell had sketched a bloodhound because he wanted one while growing up and he named the girl Emily Elizabeth, after his daughter.
His work had been rejected all over New York when an editor at Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) suggested he try writing a story to go with a picture he had submitted of a child and her horse-sized dog. In his pre-Clifford life, Bridwell was a filmstrip and slide illustrator, trying to break into children's publishing to support his family. Scholastic had been in business for decades before Clifford, but the series' success inspired the publisher to look for other stories with brand appeal, including "Goosebumps," "The Magic School Bus" and "I Spy."īridwell had completed two more Clifford books to be released next year, Scholastic said in a statement. Scholastic, which became a top children's publisher thanks in part to Clifford, installed bright red cushions on the chairs in the corporate headquarters' auditorium in New York.
Spinoffs include cartoons with John Ritter as the voice of Clifford and future "Hunger Games" novelist Suzanne Collins among the script writers.
"A lot of people were Clifford fans and that makes them Norman fans, too," said his wife of 56 years.Ĭlifford became standard nighttime reading for countless families and a money machine for publisher Scholastic Inc. Images of Clifford have appeared everywhere from museums to the White House. Starting in 1963 with "Clifford, the Big Red Dog," Bridwell wrote and illustrated more than 40 Clifford books, from "Clifford and the Grouchy Neighbors" to "Clifford Goes to Hollywood." More than 120 million copies have sold worldwide, along with cartoons, a feature film, a musical, stuffed animals, key chains, posters and stickers. He passed peacefully with family members at his bedside, she said. He suffered from several ailments, including a recurrence of prostate cancer, she said. Norman Bridwell, a soft-spoken illustrator whose impromptu story about a girl and her puppy marked the unlikely birth of the supersized franchise Clifford the Big Red Dog, has died at 86.īridwell, who lived for decades in a house with a bright red door on Martha's Vineyard off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, died Friday at Martha's Vineyard Hospital, where he had been for about three weeks after a fall at home in Edgartown, his wife, Norma, said.
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