The Snowy Day
Ezra Jack Keats's 1962 picture book follows Peter, a young Black child in a red snowsuit, as he steps out into the snow piled on his city street. He makes tracks, drags a stick through the drifts, watches older boys throw snowballs, and saves a snowball in his pocket for the next day. Keats built his illustrations from collage, paint, and patterned papers, and gave a small everyday adventure the weight of a full story. The Snowy Day won the Caldecott Medal in 1963 and is widely cited as the first mainstream American picture book to feature a Black child as its hero. It has stayed in print for more than sixty years.
What you might want to know about The Snowy Day
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A little boy named Peter wakes up to a city covered in snow and spends a whole day exploring it.
In her December 2018 By the Book interview with The New York Times, Michelle Obama named The Snowy Day as a childhood favorite she still loved, saying she remembered seeing a young Black boy on the page and feeling that her own world belonged in a book.
It is written for ages roughly 3 to 7 but works as a read-aloud from infancy. Many adults also collect it for the art and historical significance.
The Snowy Day was written by Ezra Jack Keats, published in 1962 by Viking Books for Young Readers.
The Snowy Day is 32 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Snowy Day takes most readers under an hour to finish.
The Snowy Day is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
