September 16, 1898
How a German-Born Artist, Refugee, Children’s Author, and Observer of Animals Helped Create Curious George — and Turned Curiosity into a World of Pictures
H. A. Rey was born Hans Augusto Reyersbach in Hamburg, Germany, on September 16, 1898. Long before a small monkey made his name familiar to generations of children, Rey was fascinated by animals, drawing, and the problem of capturing movement with a few clear lines.
As a boy, he frequently visited Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Zoo, observing animals closely and drawing what he saw. That habit of looking would remain central to his work. Rey’s animals rarely feel posed. They stretch, climb, bend, peer, tumble, and reach.
That combination — observation and play — would eventually help produce one of the most enduring characters in twentieth-century children’s literature.
With his wife, Margret Rey, he created Curious George, the little monkey whose desire to investigate almost everything reliably leads to trouble, discovery, escape, and another adventure.
George’s defining trait is not strength, wisdom, or obedience.
It is curiosity.
And Rey made curiosity move.
From Hamburg to Brazil
Rey’s path toward children’s literature was anything but direct. He was drafted into the German army during the First World War and later studied in Munich and Hamburg. In the 1920s he moved to Brazil, where he worked in business while continuing to draw.
There he reconnected with Margret Waldstein, whom he had known through their families in Hamburg. Margret arrived in Brazil in 1935, and the two married in Rio de Janeiro on August 16, 1935.
Soon afterward they moved to Europe and eventually settled in Paris.
Their creative partnership became fundamental.
Hans was the principal illustrator, with an extraordinary ability to give animals personality through posture, line, and motion. Margret played a central role in developing the stories and writing their texts. In the earliest publications, Hans often received the visible author credit, but the books were very much the result of their combined work.
Curious George had two creators.
That matters because the character’s success depends on both sides of the partnership: the visual energy that makes George leap from the page and the storytelling rhythm that turns his curiosity into narrative.
Before George Was George
The monkey who became Curious George did not appear fully formed.
In Paris, the Reys created Rafi et les 9 Singes, published in 1939, a story about a giraffe and nine monkeys. One of those monkeys became the seed of a new character.
By early 1940, the Reys were developing a separate story about him. At that stage he was known as Fifi, not George.
The distinction matters. George was not simply lifted unchanged from the earlier book. He emerged gradually as Hans and Margret recognised that one particularly mischievous monkey could carry a story of his own.
The basic engine was beautifully simple: the monkey sees something, wants to know more, approaches it, touches it — and something goes wrong.
That pattern mirrors childhood itself. Children live inside a world full of systems they do not yet understand: doors, machines, animals, vehicles, tools, streets, and adults.
Curiosity makes them experiment.
Rey’s drawings make that experimentation visible.
The illustration does not merely accompany the story. It thinks alongside it.
The Manuscript That Escaped Paris
Then history entered the story.
On June 12, 1940, as German forces approached Paris, Hans and Margret Rey fled the city on bicycles. They were Jewish refugees escaping a rapidly collapsing France, and among the limited possessions they carried were manuscripts and artwork for children’s books.
Their journey took them south through France, then through Spain and Portugal, eventually to Brazil and finally the United States.
Among the papers that survived the escape was the developing story of the monkey who would become Curious George.
The contrast is extraordinary.
Europe was falling into war. Two refugees were moving from border to border. And among the things they carried was a children’s story about curiosity.
The episode should not be romanticised. Their escape involved real danger, uncertainty, documents, borders, transport, and luck. But the survival of those manuscripts gives the later books an additional historical weight.
Curious George survived because Hans and Margret Rey survived.
George Arrives in America
The Reys reached New York, where their publishing career began again. In February 1941, they received a four-book contract from Houghton Mifflin, and later that year the first American Curious George was published.
Fifi became George.
The Reys eventually produced seven original Curious George books, concluding with Curious George Goes to the Hospital in 1966.
The series succeeded because George’s mistakes do not feel like sermons disguised as stories. He learns, certainly, but curiosity generates the narrative naturally.
George investigates because he cannot help himself.
He is constantly encountering systems larger than his understanding. He tries them anyway. Sometimes the result is chaos. Sometimes discovery. Usually both.
The books therefore have an unusually generous attitude toward childhood.
The world is complicated.
You may misunderstand it.
You may make a mess.
Keep looking.
Curiosity is treated not as a flaw to eliminate, but as an energy that needs somewhere to go.
Drawing the Stars
Rey’s visual intelligence extended far beyond monkeys.
He also had a serious interest in astronomy and devised new ways of presenting constellations so ordinary readers could recognise them more easily. His books The Stars: A New Way to See Them from 1952 and Find the Constellations from 1954 became lasting introductions to the night sky.
This part of his work fits surprisingly well beside Curious George.
In both cases, Rey begins with something complicated and asks:
How can I make this easier to see?
A monkey’s personality appears through clean lines and movement.
A constellation becomes memorable through a clearer visual pattern.
The subjects are different.
The instinct is the same.
Rey was not only an illustrator.
He was a designer of attention.
Why It Matters
H. A. Rey matters because he helped create a character whose entire identity is built around approaching the unknown.
Curious George does not wait for the world to explain itself. He climbs toward it, touches it, tests it, gets into trouble, and tries again.
That makes him more than an entertaining children’s character. He embodies something fundamental about learning: understanding often begins with the impulse to investigate.
Rey’s own life gives that idea unexpected depth. He crossed countries, languages, professions, war, exile, children’s publishing, animal illustration, and astronomy. Again and again, his work turned complexity into something approachable without draining it of wonder.
H. A. Rey died on August 26, 1977.
George kept moving.
Still reaching.
Still opening.
Still looking where perhaps he should not.
And still demonstrating the principle that made Rey’s work endure:
sometimes a story begins simply because someone wants to know what happens next.
Key Shifts in English
- Animal illustration became central to an enduring form of twentieth-century children’s storytelling.
- Curious George made curiosity itself into character and plot.
- Pictures carried personality through gesture, movement, expression, and visual rhythm.
- Childhood mistakes became opportunities for discovery rather than merely disobedience.
- The partnership of H. A. and Margret Rey produced one of children’s literature’s most recognisable characters.
- A manuscript carried out of wartime France became part of American literary culture.
- Refugee history and children’s storytelling became unexpectedly connected through the Reys’ escape.
- Simple visual storytelling made complicated situations accessible to young readers.
- Rey applied the same clarity of observation to animals and to the night sky.
- Children’s literature gained a character whose defining impulse was the desire to investigate.
Word Nook Connections
Curiosity — George turns the desire to know into movement, trouble, discovery, and story; curiosity is not merely one of his traits, but the engine of the entire character.
Imagination — Rey could take animals, city streets, machines, or even constellations and reshape them into visual worlds a child could immediately enter.
Playfulness — The Curious George stories thrive on experimentation: rules bend, mistakes become adventures, and learning often begins with a little harmless disorder.
H. A. Rey gave curiosity a face, a tail, and the irresistible habit of reaching for whatever came next.
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