To say The Snowy Day is a simple story about a simple boy would be, well…an oversimplification. And yet, there's some truth to it.

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats is about something everyone has experienced: the wonderment of youth. A child wakes up to a world blanketed in white and spends the next several hours exploring the magic that is a snow day: making tracks in the snow, sliding down hills, making snow angels, building snowmen, and coming home to a warm house. Things don't get much simpler than that. And yet, the way in which Keats chose to illustrate this seemingly straightforward story made it anything but simple.

Published in 1962, the same year that the first black student was admitted to the University of Mississippi, The Snowy Day was the first mainstream children's book to feature an African American child as its hero. It was a seemingly bold move, and yet it was really the sense of wonderment that Keats was focused on. According to Keats, the choice of Peter, an African American child, as the book's protagonist wasn't an attempt to make a point or advance a cause. As Keats put it, "My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along."

While the book received critical acclaim right away, both for its artistic cut-paper collage approach to illustration and for featuring, without fanfare, a child of color, it also stirred up a bit of controversy. Some people critical of the book suggested it was presumptuous for a Jewish man to write about the experience of African American child. When faced with that charge, Keats allegedly replied, "How can you put a color on a child's experience in the snow?"

And a few years after the book's publication, the Council on Interracial Books for Children criticized Keats for portraying a black character without any cultural context. In other words, the Council felt that Keats's character could just as easily have been white, so while it was nice to see a black face, the book did little to raise social consciousness. Nevertheless, in the publication that lodged this criticism against the book, there was also a recommendation for The Snowy Day in a section of book reviews.

Overall, the acclaim for The Snowy Day has far outweighed the criticism. It won the Caldecott Medal in 1963, earned a spot on the New York Public Library's Books of the Century list in 1996, and was included on The Library of Congress's list of Books that Shaped America in 2012.

And proving that The Snowy Day remains relevant more than 50 years after its publication, in 2017 Amazon created an original animated holiday special based on the famous Ezra Jack Keats book.

Those are no small feats for a book that, at its foundation, really is a very simple story.

Because the New York Public Library named it as one of the most influential books of the 20th century—right up there with The Metamorphosis, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lolita—and it's a picture book. So what is it, exactly, about The Snowy Day that has earned it a place among such esteemed company?

Simple. Ezra Jack Keats's story of a young boy's day in the snow was the first mainstream U.S. picture book to feature an African American child as its hero.

In 1962, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, that was a big deal. And it still is. People had never seen such a depiction before, and though race had nothing to do with the plot of the book, Peter's brown skin was striking and—yes—groundbreaking, then and for many years after.

As Sherman Alexie said in 2007 when he accepted his National Book Award:

I vividly remember the first time I pulled that book off the shelf […]. I was most intrigued by that little boy. A black boy, a brown boy, a beige boy. It was the first time I ever looked at a book where somebody resembled me. (Source)

So, was this seemingly simple picture book one of the most influential books of the 20th century? No doubt. And that's a pretty good reason to care.