Chanticleer and the Fox (book)

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Chanticleer and the Fox is a 1958 children's picture book by Barbara Cooney, who also illustrated it. It reimagines The Nun’s Priest’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, translated by Robert Mayer Lumiansky. Crowell published it in the United States, and it won the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1959. It was also named one of The Horn Book’s best books of the year.

Cooney’s idea came from noticing the bright plumage of exotic chickens in late-afternoon light. After reading Chaucer, she found a way to tell the tale through pictures and did research on medieval life. She used scratchboard for her illustrations and, because color was expensive, was allowed five colors on many pages. Some pages used two colors, red and black, and some double-page spreads were designed to maximize the effect despite the limited palette.

In accepting the Caldecott Medal, Cooney expressed that children deserve a robust literary diet with big themes like good and evil, love and hate, life and death, and that they can handle more than adults sometimes think. The award marked a turning point for her: she later worked on a full-color book set in France and shifted from scratchboard to painting. Critics have noted the book’s clear, fresh retelling and how the color limitations were turned into strengths.