Willems was brought up in New Orleans, the only child of a ceramicist father and a mother who was a corporate attorney and an honorary consul to the Dutch Embassy. His parents grew up in the Netherlands, during the Second World War, a period when his mother sometimes went hungry. After Willems was born, his father worked in hotels while his wife went to college and law school. She became very successful. Willems’s parents weren’t against his having a career in the arts, as so many parents (understandably) are; they were just against his being a failure. “I remember them telling me, ‘If you end up on the street, we’ll just walk past you, we won’t help,’ ” Willems said. His parents deny saying this, and Willems is estranged from them.

In the fourth grade, Willems was cast in a minor part in the school play, and had just one line. “I was furious,” he said. “I remember, I said to myself, ‘Next time, I’m going to have the lead.’ So I went out and got involved in community theatre right away.” In the eighth grade, he was Li’l Abner. Willems was naturally ambitious: at the age of five, a fan of “Peanuts,” he wrote to Charles Schulz, asking if he could have his job when he died. (Schulz didn’t write back.) By the time Willems was sixteen, he was writing a comic strip for a local real-estate magazine. The strip was called “Surrealty.” “I took whatever creative work I could,” he said. “I was never into being precious—I was into just making stuff.” Willems attended New York University, and when he graduated his parents gave him a yearlong trip around the world. He drew a cartoon to commemorate each of the three hundred and sixty-five days.

Last fall, the New-York Historical Society put on an exhibit called “The Art and Whimsy of Mo Willems.” “My basic feeling is that childhood sucks,” Willems said, when I met him there. “I didn’t like my childhood.” He recalled an art teacher who tore up his cartoons in class. “I want my work to be a counter to that.” On display at the show was a still from an animated short film that he made as an undergraduate, “The Man Who Yelled.” In the film, a Willems-like man in a coffee shop hears an amazing yell; he becomes the yeller’s manager; both profit from performances of the yell; the yelling man is then pursued by a man with a knife; but when the yeller yells the pursuer is startled, and his knife flies up and impales him. The film may not be for kids, but in a sense it has a happy ending: the yeller survives.

“I was into triangles then,” Willems said of the still, which was drawn with acute angles and no curves. “I hated the roundness and fullness of Disney animation, and I didn’t know why you would want these round, dimensional characters, these imitations of life, who are basically the roommates of reality. I wanted something flat, and unreal.” Willems said that he didn’t really start drawing circles until he felt that he could draw a circle that was a kind of triangle. The visual style of his books remains flat, a quietly assertive, not-our-world aesthetic, circles and all.

Willems said, “I understood that the only way to get to make an animated film was to have already made an animated film,” and so he parlayed his student film into work doing interstitials—bits in between shows—and short films for Nickelodeon. The films were called “The Off-Beats” and they enabled him to get a twenty-two-minute Valentine’s Day special made, in part because, he said, “I knew you couldn’t do a full-length show unless you had already done a full-length show.” He used the special to get a regular animated series on the Cartoon Network, “Sheep in the Big City,” which ran for two seasons. At around the same time, he worked for “Sesame Street,” writing sketches as part of a team that won six Emmys for Outstanding Writing in a Children’s Series.

Through his mid-twenties, Willems performed standup comedy, wrote for television, drew comics, rode a motorcycle through the streets of New York, rolled his own cigarettes, and had a girlfriend with whom he spoke French. Many young men in such circumstances would feel triumphant. But Amy Donaldson, a friend from Willems’s childhood, told me, “He was maybe twenty-five years old, and we were in a café late at night, and he was telling me that he was totally washed up, that he had failed, that it was over for him.”

Willems’s books reveal a preoccupation with failure, even an alliance with it. In “Elephants Cannot Dance!,” they can’t; in “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!,” Pigeon, despite all his pleading and cajoling, never does. Willems told me, “At ‘Sesame Street,’ they would give us these workshops about the importance of failure, but then in our skits all the characters had to be great at what they did, everything had to work out. That drove me crazy.” One of his most memorable sketches on “Sesame Street” was about a Muppet, Rosita, who wants to play the guitar; she isn’t very good, even by the end of the episode. Many artists talk about the importance of failure, but Willems seems particularly able to hold on to the conviction of it. He is a distinctly kind, mature, and thoughtful person to spend time with, and there was only one anecdote that he told me twice. It was about a feeling he had recently while walking his dog, a kind of warm humming feeling starting in his abdomen, which, he said, he had never had before. Was it happiness? I asked. He said no. He’d felt happiness before. This was something different. He said he thought that, for the first time ever, he was feeling success.

“The soup of the day is mushroom-barley, but I’d rather talk about the soup of November 6, 1946.” Facebook

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The feeling would appear to be transient. When I asked him if it felt strange to no longer be writing Elephant and Piggie books—I was still working on a way to break the news to my daughter, who had been using the Other Titles endpaper as a field of dreams—he said, “Well, at least now I have my obituary.” Shortly afterward, he said, unprompted, “I think ‘What are you working on next?’ is the worst question. It’s such a bad question. I hate that question. Everyone asks that question. I want to say, ‘Isn’t this good enough for you?’ ”

I laughed. Maybe the question was just standard journalese, I floated, and not personal.

“No,” he said. “It’s just a really bad question.”

When Willems was twenty-seven, he and his father made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain. His father wanted to take a horse-drawn wagon, as would have been done in the past. Setting out from southern Holland, his father rented a wagon, which came with a horse named Norton and—Willems swears—a dog called Fukkije. Willems met him in France. “The carriage weighed something like five thousand pounds, but there were clowns painted on the side,” he said. “So even when we were sinking into the mud of a field or nearly falling off a bridge, locals were handing us their children to take pictures.” This was not the first major journey Willems and his father had taken together: when Willems was fifteen, they walked from Golfe-Juan to Paris, following the route of Napoleon’s return from Elba; when he was seventeen, they kayaked the Rhine from the Bodensee to Nijmegen.