Clifford the Big Red Dog
Norman Bridwell's enormous red dog and Emily Elizabeth, the girl who loved him — a 1963 picture book that Scholastic never stopped handing to schoolchildren, and whose star became the company's official mascot. He was very nearly named Tiny.
Norman Bridwell created Clifford the Big Red Dog in 1963, publishing it through Scholastic. Bridwell was born February 15, 1928 in Kokomo, Indiana. He carried a 1962 portfolio around and was turned down again and again; the drawing that eventually stuck showed a young girl with a horse-sized bloodhound, drawn out of Bridwell's own childhood wish for a dog that big. The dog is red because of a jar of red poster paint that happened to be sitting on his drawing table.
He meant to call him Tiny. It was Bridwell's wife, Norma, who suggested "Clifford" — the name of her own childhood imaginary friend, not his. The girl became Emily Elizabeth, after the Bridwells' daughter. So the most famous big red dog in American publishing was almost a giant bloodhound named Tiny, and owes his name to someone else's invisible companion.
Clifford did not stay a book character. He became the official mascot of Scholastic Corporation, and by 1990 he was a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. That is the strange part of his hold on the 1990s: the book was already old. Scholastic's business is selling books to schoolchildren, and its mascot was a picture book from 1963 — so a kid meeting Clifford in 1994 was meeting something thirty years established, wearing the logo of the company that supplied the classroom. More than a hundred million copies are in print.
Bridwell kept drawing him for another two decades, and a PBS Kids series ran from 2000 to 2003. When he died on December 12, 2014, aged eighty-six, two more Clifford books were still to come; they were published after his death.
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