At the time of its release, the book was widely lauded. The magazine The Horn Book said of the novel: “Gay Neck is truly a carrier pigeon, a bearer of messages, and his messages are words of courage and love.” The New Republic called Gay Neck “a distinguished contribution,” and praised Boris Artzybasheff’s illustrations as “altogether beautiful.” In 1928, Mukerji won the John Newbery Medal, awarded every year for the best work of American literature for children. He’s widely considered the first Indian American who successfully wrote for American audiences, and Gay Neck was his fourth book for young readers.

Yet, 90 years on, this once-celebrated book, which has remained in print since its publication, is rarely mentioned in discussions of racial and ethnic diversity in books for kids, as if Mukerji were some sort of aberration rather than an early chapter of what could have been. In recent years, there has been more activism in the children’s literature community centered on representation—but diversity advocates can sometimes have a limited view of the genre’s history, argues Uma Krishnaswami, an author and an instructor in the low-residency MFA program in writing for children and young adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. “By all reckoning, Gay Neck should have established a publishing trend, but didn’t for many complicated reasons,” she told me.

Gay Neck and Mukerji found unlikely success nearly a century ago thanks to the collision of a number of forces, both personal and historical—including Mukerji’s prodigious talent, U.S. immigration policy, and seismic events such as world war and decolonization on the Indian subcontinent. Understanding why the book fell out of public view can help American writers and illustrators, as well as educators, better understand how geographical shifts, politics, and migration today shape the literary world for the children of tomorrow.

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Mukerji’s life illustrates the ways the history of South Asian literature intersects with the history of the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. The writer was born in 1890 in a village outside Calcutta, and made his way to California in 1910, soon earning his bachelor’s degree in English at Stanford University.

It was at Stanford where Mukerji began distinguishing himself as a literary talent. “My father was a masterful storyteller,” his son, Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr., told me in a phone interview in 2004, five years before his own death. “He discovered that he could make more money as a poetry reader than washing dishes while he was a graduate student at Stanford.” So Mukerji connected with Paul Elder, a prominent San Francisco publisher who later released Mukerji’s first two volumes of poetry and his first play. “My father would charge 50 cents per head to listen to him recite poetry. He had a great command of the English language and knew Milton’s Paradise Lost by heart. He would charge a special price on the nights he recited that,” Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr. said.