“Bill could hear a line and tell if it was there yet.” “The flow and number of syllables in each word has to be right,” Sampson said. Most of the books rely on a carefully chosen rhythm. Martin and Sampson wrote as many as 30 drafts of each book they developed together, including “Swish!” (1997) about a girls’ basketball team. Besides that, he was very social he liked to be with other people.” “He was orally based and liked to work with collaborators who were visually based.

“Bill had to bounce ideas off someone else,” Sampson told The Times on Monday.

Martin wrote two of his best-known books, “Brown Bear” and “Chicka Chicka” on his own, but he liked to collaborate with a writing partner, talking the story through as the first step. “Bill came from an Ozark tradition of storytelling and was himself a very good storyteller,” said Goodman, a retired professor at the University of Arizona, who first met Martin at a reading conference in the late 1960s. He credited his grandmother, a gifted storyteller, and his fifth-grade teacher, who read to his class every day, for enticing him into the world of reading and writing. Martin often made animals his main characters - “fluting” flamingos and “braying” zebras - which he described with words that a child might not recognize at first, but could begin to understand by listening. “He made learning how to read something emotional, not just didactic.” “Bill was the soul of modern reading instruction,” Ken Goodman, a former president of the International Reading Assn., told The Times on Monday. He was also one of the first children’s authors to tour schools and bookstores, promoting his new books by reading aloud to children, often accompanied by music and dancing.įor a time in the 1950s he was the host of a regional television program, “The Storyteller,” and years later produced audiotapes of his books. He pioneered a participatory approach to learning, with stories that encouraged a child to answer the questions that were raised throughout a book.

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