The Pushcart War

1964, undated probably 1970s Grosset & Dunlap edition
Jean Merrill
Illustrated by Ronni Solbert
The Pushcart War
Bought new for 85 cents
Very worn paperback
B

This is Merrill's best known work (according to Wikipedia), and yet it's a half-forgotten little classic (cf. Amazon reviews).  It tells the "history" of a war between trucks and pushcarts, or rather the drivers of said vehicles.  Later editions kept pushing the date forward, so it was always "the future."  My copy has the author looking back a decade after the 1986 war.  She Hitchcocks in the chapter with letters to the editor, and claims to have met some of the minor players. 

The book is as New-Yorky as A Cricket in Times Square, with many of the characters having a New-Yorkish way of putting sentences together, such as "Should I be the Pushcart King for nothing?"  and "So maybe I should die now."  The story is more ethnically diverse than some of its contemporaries, although less than the actual New York City.  One of the cleverest pushcart peddlers is Spanish-speaking.  There aren't very many female characters, and one of them is sort of a Gracie-Allenesque starlet (dumb blonde who stumbles upon wisdom on accident), but General Anna is a brave old lady.

Merrill handles big issues, like war, in a light manner.  Her Toothpaste Millionaire (1972) shows a friendship between a white girl and a black boy, although the story isn't about race per se.  Here, there is a sense of danger, but mostly the violence is on the level of pea-shooters.  I don't know if she came up with the term "Peace Army" but the book does feel a bit prescient about politics in the later '60s.

My copy calls it a "laugh-out-loud saga," but it's more of a book to make you smile than guffaw or even chuckle.  This isn't as lovable or memorable a book as The Cricket in TS, and Solbert's illustrations aren't on the level of Williams's of course (though I am fond of the picture of the peddlers huddled around a fire, under a bridge), but it's a good follow-up if you're looking for another New York children's book from the first half of the 1960s.