The Very Hungry Caterpillar
1969 book by Eric Carle
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a 1969 children's picture book by American author and illustrator Eric Carle. The plot follows a very hungry caterpillar that consumes a variety of foods before pupating and becoming a butterfly. It incorporates elements that contribute to early childhood education, including numbers and the days of the week.
Since its publication, the book has sold more than 55 million copies and has been translated into over 70 languages. According to its publisher, Penguin Random House, a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar is sold every 30 seconds. It has been acclaimed as "one of the greatest childhood classics of all time" and praised for its "iconic" art style, featuring collage artwork and pages with holes where the caterpillar "ate" through.
Synopsis
One night, a little egg lies on a leaf. On an early Sunday morning, "a tiny and very hungry caterpillar" hatches from his egg and immediately begins searching for food. For the following five days, the caterpillar eats through an increasing quantity of fruit: one apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, three plums on Wednesday, four strawberries on Thursday, and five oranges on Friday. However, the caterpillar remains hungry.
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” enters the record as 1969 book by Eric Carle. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Very, Hungry and Caterpillar can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Very, Hungry and Caterpillar provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q491657. VIAF identifies the subject as 218121506. The Library of Congress control number is no2018098536. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.