The Bashful Mongonoose is a children’s story I wrote and illustrated for my sister Mary Claire, starting the year she turned one and finishing on Halloween night, 1959, when I was twenty and she was two. My parents had asked me to help raise and educate her, and this book was part of that — my own primitive-primate circus tale, complete with a lion, an elephant, a chimpanzee, and a mysterious creature discovered in a barrel that saves Mr. Pringle’s failing circus simply by being strange enough for crowds to pay to see. The title itself is Mary Claire’s: she couldn’t quite manage “mongoose” the way the popular cartoon character of the day was named, and out of her mispronunciation came my own invented animal — bashful, reluctant, and, in the end, better off left alone.

I illustrated it myself, in the cartoon style of the children’s characters Mary Claire and I both grew up on, and I still think the story holds up as more than nostalgia: it’s about the cost of being made into a spectacle, and about the people (or animals) around you who finally notice you’d rather just be quiet. The full book is available below as PDF and Flipbook.