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.
Bridwell, 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.
He suffered from several ailments, including a recurrence of prostate cancer, she said. He passed peacefully with family members at his bedside, she said.
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. Images of Clifford have appeared everywhere from museums to the White House.
“A lot of people were Clifford fans and that makes them Norman fans, too,” said his wife of 56 years.
Clifford became standard nighttime reading for countless families and a money machine for publisher Scholastic Inc. Spinoffs include cartoons with John Ritter as the voice of Clifford and future Hunger Games novelist Suzanne Collins among the script writers.
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. 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.
Bridwell had completed two more Clifford books to be released next year, Scholastic said in a statement.
Bridwell was born in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1928. He was not a star in art or writing classes, but his mechanical skills were so much worse that a high school shop teacher suggested he stick to drawing. After graduation, he attended the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, then moved to New York and studied at Cooper Union. Bridwell spent much of the 1950s as a commercial artist.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Bridwell is survived by a son, Timothy, and three grandchildren. The family planned a private service with a public celebration of his life and work to come later, likely over the summer, his wife said.
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