The Cricket In Times Square

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1960

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Authorial Context: George Selden and Illustrator Garth Williams

George Selden Thompson, known professionally as George Selden, was a Connecticut native like Chester. Selden was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1929. He attended Yale University, where he studied English and classical literature, and attended Columbia University for three summer sessions. Selden earned a BA from Yale in 1951. He also received a Fulbright Scholarship and studied abroad in Rome for a year. Unlike Chester, Selden decided to make New York City his home.

Selden wrote nearly 20 books and two plays, most intended for children. Selden’s first popular children’s book was The Garden Under the Sea (1957), about a lobster and his ocean friends who want a fair trade from people who are taking shells from their beach. The book, later reprinted as Oscar Lobster’s Fair Exchange, was successful and prompted Selden to write another book with engaging animal characters. Selden describes how he got the idea for his most famous title:

One night I was coming home on the subway, and I did hear a cricket chirp in the Times Square subway station. The story formed in my mind within minutes. An author is very thankful for minutes like those, although they happen all too infrequently (“George Selden.” Macmillan Publishers).

The Cricket in Times Square, published in 1960, won the Newbery Honor award in 1961 and received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963. The latter award, offered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1959 to 1979, honored titles that had qualities similar to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and were deemed “worthy” to sit on the same shelf as Carroll’s fantasy. (Bartell, Joyce. “The Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.” Elementary English, vol. 36, no. 3, National Council of Teachers of English, March 1959. JSTOR).

Selden wrote six more stories about Chester and his friends, including Tucker’s Countryside (1969), Harry Cat’s Pet Puppy (1974), Chester Cricket’s Pigeon Ride (1981), Chester Cricket’s New Home (1983), Harry Kitten and Tucker Mouse (1986), and finally, The Old Meadow (1987). All were published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Selden’s editor there, Stephen Roxburgh, praised Selden’s writing, commenting, “There is a remarkable innocence and whimsy about his characters, and an extraordinary gentleness” (“George Selden, 60, Writer of Tales Describing a Cricket’s Adventures.” New York Times, 6 December 1989). Selden lived and wrote in his Greenwich Village home in New York City until his death in 1989.

Garth Williams illustrated more than 80 books, including all of George Selden’s stories about Chester and his friends. The New Yorker dubbed Williams the “Illustrator of American Childhood” (Larson, Sarah. “Garth Williams Illustrator of American Childhood.” The New Yorker, 3 June 2016) because his cozy, engaging pen-and-ink illustrations brought so many children’s classics to life, including Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, E. B. White’s Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952), and Russell Hoban’s Bedtime for Frances (1960).

Williams was born in New York City in 1912 but spent a large part of his childhood on a farm in New Jersey. The family later moved to England. During WWII, Williams was a volunteer ambulance driver for the British Red Cross. Both of Williams’s parents were artists. Williams tried to be a cartoonist like his father, but the New Yorker rejected his cartoons, saying that his work was “too wild and European” (Gussow, Mel. “Garth Williams, Book Illustrator, Dies at 84.” New York Times, 10 May 1996), though the magazine did accept some of his other illustrations. Stuart Little, by E. B. White, was the first children’s book that Williams illustrated, and it was so successful that Williams dedicated his career to illustrating children’s books.

Williams understood the powerful impact that books can have on children and said that he hoped his illustrations would “awaken something of importance […] humor, responsibility, respect for others, interest in the world at large” (Gussow). Williams died in 1996. He was posthumously awarded an Original Art Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Illustrators in 2017.

Cultural Context: Crickets Across Cultures

Crickets feature prominently in the history and folklore of many cultures, and The Cricket in Times Square alludes to the worldwide popularity of the tiny cricket through many mentions of how crickets bring good luck and through more specific anecdotes (e.g., Chinatown shopkeeper Sai Fong’s sharing the legend of Hsi Shuai, the first cricket, who was once a man who told only the truth until the gods turned him into a cricket to save his life).

In China, the cricket symbolizes luck, virtue, and long life. Crickets are “a key component of Chinese traditional culture’’ and are supposed to bring good fortune and act as poetic muses (Guo, Sally. “Chinese Cricket.” ChinaTravel.com, 30 May 2021). An account dating back to the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) describes how palace concubines would catch crickets in the fall and keep them in gilt cages beside their beds so that they could listen to their chirping at night. Common people quickly followed their example. Cricket houses became a unique Chinese art form. People kept pet singing crickets in everything from fancy, hollowed-out gourds to woven bamboo and even cloisonné cages. The cricket’s chirp is “still one of the most cherished sounds in Chinese culture” (Voon, Claire. “In Ancient China, Pet Crickets Spent the Winter in Opulent Gourds.” Atlas Obscura.com, 5 June 2019).

In addition, some people in China kept fighting crickets. Fighting crickets—always males—face off against each other while a referee counts the number of their advances and retreats. Fighting crickets are valuable and aren’t allowed to fight to the death. A contemporary fighting cricket owner, Zhao Juiling, sold one of his crickets for almost $1,500 (Feng, Emily. “Inside the Jaw-Clenching World of Cricket Fighting in China.” NPR.com, 23 October 2021). Keeping crickets is still a popular tradition in China, and special markets sell singing and fighting crickets there today.

Crickets are highly valued in other cultures too. As in China, in Japan, people keep singing crickets as pets. In Ireland, crickets are considered lucky and “enchanted”: Their singing in your home is supposed to keep fairies away from the hearth (Wilde, Lady Jane Francesca. “Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland.” LibraryIreland.com). Charles Dickens’s sentimental Christmas novella The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) features a cricket who chirps by a young family’s fireside and watches over them. One character exclaims, “And it’s sure to bring us good fortune, John! It always has done so. To have a Cricket on the Hearth, is the luckiest thing in all the world!” (Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1845. Project Gutenberg). Dickens’s story popularized the lucky hearth cricket and helped start the Victorian tradition of keeping a brass cricket by the fireside.

Crickets have different meanings in Indigenous American cultures. The Cheyenne people believed that crickets predicted where buffalo herds would roam. In some Cherokee legends, crickets appeared as underdog heroes. The Hopi people had a Cricket Katsina or Kachina—an important ancestral spirit in Hopi and Pueblo mythology—called Susöpa, who appeared as a runner and a dancer.

Many cultures believe that chasing a cricket out of your house is the same as chasing away good luck, and most consider killing a cricket bad luck. However, crickets are an important food source and have been for thousands of years. Entomophagy, or the practice of eating insects, is common in Africa and Asia—and is gaining acceptance in Europe, Canada, and the US. Crickets are one of the most popular edible insects and are gaining greater worldwide acceptance as a food source because raising them for food is seen as more sustainable and environmentally friendly than raising farm animals for meat. Crickets pack a lot of protein—cricket powder has 65.5% protein!—as well as fiber and other vitamins and minerals (Kubala, Jillina. “Can You Eat Crickets? All You Need to Know.” Healthline.com, 6 May 2021).

Whether you’d like a singing cricket or a lucky brass cricket by your fireplace, or you’d choose to munch a cricket protein bar, crickets are a popular and pervasive presence in many cultures.