I had not previously heard of Hudson Talbott, but I find his obituary touching.
He wrote children’s books.
Mr. Talbott’s collaboration on “Into the Woods,” published in 1988, was a happier experience. The musical, which opened on Broadway a year earlier, is for adults — although it is based in part on folk tales by the Brothers Grimm, and features characters like Cinderella that are familiar to children. Mr. Talbott adapted it for a younger audience.
James Lapine, the musical’s Tony Award-winning librettist, said in an email that the book “honors our show rather than reinvents it.”
Mr. Talbott used a lush visual style, which he described as “more or less 18th-century French,” for illustrations like the depiction of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother inside the wolf’s open mouth, and he rewrote the story with help from Mr. Sondheim’s notes.
“Both Steve and I loved what he did,” Mr. Lapine said. “And the book remains my favorite gift to anyone who has a child.”
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As a child, he showed artistic talent, but he had difficulty reading; he discovered later in life that he had dyslexia. In his semi-autobiographical book “A Walk in the Words” (2021), he wrote that drawing allowed him to disappear into a safe world all his own.
“I was the slowest reader in my class,” he wrote. “When everybody was turning to the next page, I was still on the first sentence. Nobody knew. But the books knew! And they were coming for me!”
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Nancy Paulsen, the president and publisher of an imprint at Penguin Young Readers, who edited over a dozen of Mr. Talbott’s books, said that he was more confident in his artwork than in his writing. In painting, he employed various styles and was inspired by work from the Renaissance and the Hudson River School.
“He was very sophisticated about what he showed kids, but it was very easy to understand,” Ms. Paulsen said in an interview. “In ‘A Walk in the Words,’ when you see the wall of words, a kid knows what he’s doing there.”
In one part of the book, the boy cowers before the wall of words; in another, he tears down a wall of shame.
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In 2022, Mr. Talbott spoke by Zoom to dyslexic students at a school in Richmond, Va., telling them that, as a child, he had dealt with his own challenges by spending too much time alone — “and nobody was there to help me, and it wasn’t their fault because I was hiding it.”
“If I could go back in time,” he added, “I would try to say to me, as a little boy, ‘Don’t be ashamed. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You are who you are, and you read the way you read.’”