The Enormous Egg

April has been designation National Humor Month. Many children tell adults that they just want funny books. One of my favorites in this category, Oliver Butterworth’s The Enormous Egg was created in 1956 and concerns a favorite topic of children: dinosaurs.

Nate Twichell, an ordinary boy in Freedom, New Hampshire, helps on the family farm and in his father’s printing press for the local paper (circulation 800). One day his chicken lays an enormous egg; Nate and his father carefully tend it for six weeks. And then, surprise! A baby Triceratops, which Ned names Uncle Beazley, hatches and begins to eat his way through the Twichell farm, doubling his weight every few days. A visiting scientist from Washington, D.C. gets involved, and eventually Congress has their say before Ned’s companion finds a permanent home in the National Zoo. I hadn’t read this book for years and was struck, as an adult, by Butterworth’s cynicism about congressmen. It almost makes the book seem contemporary.

Butterworth’s archives at the Thomas Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut reveal that he hoped to illustrate his own novel, only to have editor Dudley Cloud of the Atlantic Monthly put a kibosh on that idea. Butterworth then expressed the hope that Garth Williams, who had so magically illustrated Stuart Little, might be employed. In the end Louis Darling illustrated the book and was paid the extravagant fee of $1,000—causing the publisher to express consternation at the expense. After all, Butterworth himself had only been given $500 in advance for this whimsical story.

A year after the book’s release, the publisher was no longer complaining; the book had sold 4,820 copies, “which ain’t hay, hooray.” In print ever since, the book has gone on to win scores of admirers. At one point Butterworth’s editor had hopes for television adaptation, but told his writer: “It wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t believe in TV.”

Well, Butterworth did believe in creating an engaging character that children would admire and emulate. Who wouldn’t want to raise a dinosaur from an egg? Although the plot is, of course, nonsensical, Butterworth presents it in such a believable way that young readers and parents are taken along for the ride. Like Jurassic Park, The Enormous Egg rests on the fantasy that dinosaurs and humans could cohabit this planet. Even if we haven’t yet figured out how, it still feels good to laugh at this saga, the perfect read-aloud for ages six through ten.

Here’s a passage from The Enormous Egg: