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Comment by sen | Hacker News Reader

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is probably the single most important kids book in my extended family. It was the first book I got as a kid due to my dad loving it, and Mum sewed me a little toy which was my favourite toy for many years.

It the became a “thing” where it was the first book we got for every kid born in my extended family, and now that I have my own kids 40+ years later it was the first I got for them too. They both know it by rote, have the toys, had the bed sheets, everything. They’re now in the early years of school and still absolutely love the story and have the posters in their rooms despite them being “old” for it.

RIP Eric. You’ve left an amazing mark on the world.

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What's fascinating about the Very Hungry Caterpillar was that the "stomach ache" and nice green leaf was forced upon him by his publisher. He wanted it to be "caterpillar eats lots of silly things because he's hungry, becomes huge, becomes butterfly".

The moralizing "nice green leaf" was neither his idea nor desired.

To be fair, I think being sick after eating tons of candy is probably pretty accurate.

> nice green leaf was forced upon him by his publisher

As pointed out in comments elsewhere in this discussion, this factoid seems to come from a satirical parody "interview".

The only primary source for this story seems to be a parody issue of The Paris Review.[1] And his list of articles and interviews doesn't mention it.[2]

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/the-art-of-fiction-carle

[2] https://eric-carle.com/about-eric-carle/articles-interviews/

Where does it say it’s a parody issue? An April 1 publication date isn’t nearly enough evidence to make that claim, and the interview itself isn’t written in a cheeky way. What seems to make you think this is the case?

Consider that the issue is introduced as the “inaugural issue” of a companion quarterly for young readers. Then consider these entries from the table of contents:

- You Whoreson Cullionly Barber-Monger! 9 Bully-busting Insults from Shakespeare

- Your Struggle: Karl Ove Knausgaard Helps You Navigate the School Yard

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/01/the-paris-rev...

Ok, yup. You’ve convinced me. This is definitely a joke issue. :D

Also, the included word game is…hilarious. https://www.theparisreview.org/word-hunt

Ha, great find!

I'm not sure this anecdote is meant to be taken factually. It originates (apparently) from an interview with Eric Carle for a literary magazine,

https://www.theparisreview.org/the-art-of-fiction-carle

But the tone of the article is clearly tongue-in-cheek, and also it has a publication date of April 1.

I didn’t read it that way. It seems like a completely normal interview.

Look at the rest of the issue:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/01/the-paris-rev...

Definitely a parody.

You read this as a straight-faced literary defense of "Very Hungry Caterpillar"?

"I don’t recognize childhood obesity. No one should. I see children doing what they like, which is eating, and doing it without the shame or remorse later drilled into them by Judeo-Christian ethics. This is what I mean when I say juvenile morality: it’s a kind of a priori humanism. Children predate the law."

The whole interview is one long joke, and the part about the publisher changing the plot is a knowing parody of author-editor relations -- to anyone who's ever been within blast radius of one!

See my other comment on this thread, I totally see now this is a joke. :)

Oof, shows the downside of social media. My bad.

And yet you haven't corrected your original post, I have read it, believed it, and told everyone I know that the nice green leaf is propaganda.

Isn't that on you, for trusting some random on HN and failing to fact-check?

Modern life demands critical thinking skills.

Why not both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's like saying, if you believe someone's defamatory statements, that's on you, but the speaker is innocent.

That’s free speech, no?

> That's like saying, if you believe someone's defamatory statements, that's on you, but the speaker is innocent.

Not really. Being mistaken is not the same thing as being defamatory. If someone is honestly just incorrect, and you go parroting what they said without independently verifying (especially if the person is a pseudo-anonymous internet commenter and not a subject-matter expert) then frankly that is entirely your fault.

Being intentionally deceived is another matter.

Hackernews comments can't be edited or deleted after a few minutes. There's nothing he can do about it

there was an hour between the (probably wrong) information, and the evidence suggesting it might be wrong (I say probably wrong because April 1 and tongue in cheek doesn't automatically prove the anecdote is untrue)

There was 4 hours between the original probably wrong post and yours.

Did you really manage to spread to everyone you know in that 4 hours that the nice green leaf is propaganda? Why? It sounds at most like something I might drop in passing conversation, not something I would attempt to broadcast when first told of it.

on edit: having read further down I see that the probably wrong is actually wrong, it was definitely a joke issue.

Blame HN for locking the edit button after a relatively brief time, not me.

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