The US author Eric Carle, whose children's book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” became a worldwide success, is dead. Carle died on Sunday at the age of 91, his family announced on Wednesday on its website.
His father died of kidney failure in his studio in Massachusetts, son Rolf told the New York Times newspaper.
Born in Syracuse, New York in 1929, Carle was the son of German emigrants who moved back to Germany with their young son in 1935.
At the beginning of the 1950s Carle returned to the USA, where painful childhood memories from Germany under National Socialism became the driving force behind his work as a children's book author.
He has published more than 100 books that have been translated into around 70 languages.
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” - the colorfully illustrated story of a caterpillar that hatches from an egg, eats its way through all kinds of food and then pupates thick and round before it becomes a butterfly - made Carle world famous at the end of the 1960s.