During the Sixties, Alcorn illustrated numerous books for children in which he again demonstrated his independence of design and his disregard for trends and fashions.

The first of these books are particularly close to his commercial production, from the point of view of both style and themes. Books! and The Abecedarian Book were aimed at adults and children alike, and closely related to the artist’s interest in typography, while the illustrations, as full of meticulous details as ever, are similar to those used at the same time in his freelance work.

More obviously aimed at children are the three books published by Al Hine – Where in the World Do You Live?, Money Round the World and A Letter to Anywhere. These books express the curiosity typical of children (the world, money, means of communication) through a circular narrative structure that strives to simplify universal issues from the starting point of the facts.

Together with children’s writer Sesyle Joslin, whose stories at this time were mainly illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Leonard Weisgard, Alcorn designed two books for language teaching (French and Spanish) – La Petite Famille and La Fiesta – in which the illustrations go hand in hand with the text, gradually introducing new objects in an elementary but very effective film-like sequence.

The book that marks the Alcorn children’s book zenith is Pocahontas in London. This book, in fact, won the “Critici in Erba” Prize at the 6th Bologna Children’s Book Fair of 1969. Eighty-three books were judged by a jury of nine children who, according to the publisher’s announcement, were highly impressed by Alcorn’s innovative style and the sense of movement of the figures. Each spread of the book, beginning with the beautiful colored endpapers, is a multi-colored picture in itself with an immediate visual appeal.

In the wake of this success, 1969 saw the publishing of the delightful book Never Make Fun of a Turtle, My Son, in which the illustrations establish a sort of modern canon for the nursery rhyme. For these illustrations Alcorn was inspired to his sons enjoying the outdoor life on their homestead in Ossining, New York, where his work intertwined with a deeply rich family life.

Alcorn would return to children’s books in the last years of his career, this time as a grandfather, with a newfound painterly sensibility.  This return was occasioned in part by changes in the publishing industry, which now afforded the illustrator a previously inconceivable use of full-color process printing technologies. This development appealed to Alcorn, as it gave him the opportunity to transcend the production constraints imposed throughout the 1960s on his earlier picture-book endeavors, which had limited him to the use of a few select flat colors. He especially looked forward to showcasing the increasingly expansive and painterly use of pen, sepia ink and watercolor on paper which he had begun to develop in the late Eighties.

This charm may be gleaned from several plates intended to illustrate a story set in early twentieth-century Russia by Arthur A. Levine. In keeping with the narrative’s setting with a subtle, suggestive approach, Alcorn conjures up wide, open vistas in a naturalistic vein. His portrayal of the young protagonist is treated with a similar warmth and simplicity. The numerous preparatory studies Alcorn made of the boy’s head are soft, tender and mysteriously ethereal: as a result they possess a fairy-tale-like quality.

More intimately linked with Alcorn’s private life were the illustrations he created for a children’s story written by his son Kenneth, titled The Little Tree, of which numerous versions of a single scene have survived. The scene depicts a young boy pulling his sled before a house similar in style to the one in Hamburg Cove, Connecticut, to which Alcorn and Phyllis had moved in 1983. The precision of these repeated efforts suggests that he was determined to pinpoint a particular mood and atmosphere, as though it were a distant memory that somehow eluded his mind’s eye, so that what emerges is akin to an evanescent, dreamlike apparition. These images attest to Alcorn’s ability to translate intimate experiences into timeless, universal expressions of domestic bliss.