The Day the Crayons Quit

The Day the Crayons Quit is a 2013 children's picture book written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers. The book is about a boy named Duncan who tries to find a way to make his living crayons happy after he hears complaints.

A sequel, The Day the Crayons Came Home, was published in 2015.

A boy named Duncan finds a stack of letters one day in class with his name on them. As he reads through them, he sees that his colored crayons have been complaining about multiple issues, and, wanting the crayons to be happy, he mixes all of the crayons into one multi-colored one and uses it in a drawing, which his teacher awards him for.

When Daywalt graduated from Emerson College, one of his teachers, Jack Gantos, encouraged him to pursue New York City to start children's literature. Daywalt stated that he was primarily interested in writing for film and TV, to which Gantos replied saying "that’s too bad because you’re a hell of a children’s book writer." A decade after the conversation, Daywalt wrote The Day the Crayons Quit after spilling a box of crayons on his desk, thinking that "it would be funny if they could each give a monologue, chewing me out for using them wrong." After the book was published, Daywalt reconnected with Gantos, saying "I told you so."^[2]

The book became a critical and commercial success, earning positive responses from critics and selling over one-and-a-half million copies worldwide.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

Since the book's original publication in 2013, The Day the Crayons Quit has been almost unrivalled in sales within its genre. In 2015, Entertainment Weekly referred to it as the longest running title to ever appear on The New York Times Best Seller list for children's picture books, the book having held the weekly number-one spot on the list for over a year, and a total of 258 weeks on the list as of January 2019.^[8]

Critical response to the book has been largely positive. For instance, the starred review in Publishers Weekly stated, "Making a noteworthy debut, Daywalt composes droll missives that express aggravation and aim to persuade", while referring to the crayon characters as "memorable personalities [that] will leave readers glancing apprehensively at their own crayon boxes."^[9]

In 2014, Danielle Herzog of The Washington Post joyfully related the experience of reading the book to her own children. "As I read each letter to my 6 and 3-year-old children", she wrote, "they howled with laughter. They loved the argument between the orange and yellow crayon over who gets to be the color of the sun, and they cracked up when the poor white crayon is only used to make pictures of cats and snow ... But the best part came after the book was closed and put away. They rushed to their own crayon boxes, pulled out the same colors we read about, and started to color an array of pictures now gracing our refrigerator door."^[10]

The Day The Crayons Quit has won numerous children's book awards. In the year of its publication, 2013, the book won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Picture Book, was named Amazon's Best Children's Book, and was named to Time magazine's list of the 100 Best Children's Books of All Time.^[11][12][13] Later, the book won the Texas Bluebonnet Award in 2015, having received 29,931 votes from Texas children.^[14] Daywalt and Jeffers received the award in person, on April 16, 2015, at the Texas Bluebonnet Award Luncheon. The book also won the 2015 Nevada Young Readers Award, the 2016 California Young Reader Medal, and the 2016 Young Hoosier Book Award (Picture Book).^[15]

In late July 2014, the film rights for The Day the Crayons Quit were purchased by Universal Studios, with Matt Lopez set to script and Madhouse Entertainment set to produce.^[16][17]