When you read the book with children, this is a key moment to engage them by asking if the family truly thinks that Harry is a different dog entirely. He is a black dog with white spots, rather than the reverse. When Harry returns, his adventures have made him unrecognizable to his family-or so it seems. Harry’s attempt at independence has ended with an image of exclusion. Through the window he watches well-dressed businessmen and families enjoying dinner a waiter with his nose in the air looks exactly the type of person to enforce the “No Dogs” sign in the lower right corner. The transitional picture is one where Harry walks glumly past a swanky restaurant. When I read the first book with my grandchildren, I remember the same feeling I had as a child, as Harry’s excitement turned to anxiety.

Harry has fun transgressing rules, but in the end he wants to return to the security of home. Digging a hole, socializing with other dogs in an improvised playground, leaning dangerously from a bridge to watch the trains going by-are all fun until they aren’t. Somehow, Graham achieves a balance of generic and specific, as she propels Harry into motion. There is the tiny car that the boy holds delicately by a string, and the carefully rendered bath toys and faucets on the old-fashioned tub. His simple outlines, and the equally basic drawings of family members who all look alike, are punctuated with small details. He has a boxy body, even a little out of proportion. The figure of Harry isn’t especially realistic. (In the fourth book, 1965's Harry by the Sea, Graham included some people of color, reflecting a slow and belated acknowledgement of diversity in children’s books.) Even so, it’s the non-human characters whose dilemmas reflect children’s own Harry helps readers negotiate the question of what makes us who we are. The books are set in a distant era when trains spewed coal and mothers wore aprons, and when almost all the characters were white. Being forced to wear a silly sweater because it is a gift from Grandma is humiliating, but re-gifting it to a bird is gratifying. Partly, it’s the stories’ simplicity: a dog wanders away and returns home, having learned that missing his family is worse than submitting to soap and a scrub brush. The Harry books are classics that children still enjoy. After the couple divorced, no one got custody of Harry and the series ended, although Graham went on to write and illustrate several other books. Graham (1920–2015), who gave children lasting images of a good-natured dog “who liked everything, except…getting a bath,” is almost always associated with her then-husband, Gene Zion, author of Harry the Dirty Dog (1956) and three sequels. This is the centennial year of illustrator Margaret Bloy Graham’s birth.

Harry dirty dog book