I’d love to have known what Robert McCloskey thought of J.K. Rowling’s superstar status in the world of children’s literature.

McCloskey’s death on Monday came soon after the extravagantly hyped release of Rowling’s latest Harry Potter book.

And though he was one of the best known children’s authors of the 20th century, McCloskey’s regard for celebrity seemed as different from Rowling’s as her boy wizard is from his endearing all-American creations, “Homer Price” and “Lentil.”

An intensely private and reclusive man, McCloskey never felt completely comfortable in his role as a beloved literary figure. He rarely gave interviews, hated telephones and, in his later years, found it increasingly difficult to summon the energy to speak with even small groups of adoring fans.

After spending a morning with him in 1996, at his island home in Penobscot Bay, I came away feeling that this kindly man was the most reluctantly successful author I would ever have the great pleasure to meet.

A good-natured bewilderment about his enduring literary reputation ran throughout our long conversation about his life that day. He was amazed that the “simple stories” he wrote as a struggling artist more than 50 years ago continued to charm new generations of children.

The volume of letters, drawings and cards he got regularly from fans around the world overwhelmed him, he said, and he chuckled to think that grown-ups would make pilgrimages to the quaint Maine landmarks in his books, such as Condon’s Garage, that they fell in love with as children and remembered fondly ever since.

Not only was McCloskey puzzled by the lasting appeal of his books, he was equally baffled about how he ever became a writer in the first place.

“It was a surprise to find that I had become a children’s book author. I’m still surprised,” said McCloskey, who always thought of himself as an artist who used words to fill the space between his pictures.

“Bob was primarily an artist,” said his longtime friend Marc Simont, an accomplished illustrator who shared an apartment with McCloskey – and the baby mallards he used as models for “Make Way for Ducklings” – when the two were art students in Boston in the 1940s. “He was never your typical successful writer. He liked his privacy too much.”

Simont, who has illustrated 100 books, including two of James Thurber’s, last visited his old friend in Maine a couple of years ago when a representative of the Library of Congress presented McCloskey with a Living Legend award at his daughter’s home on Deer Isle.

McCloskey reacted to the honor the way he reacted to the many other honors he never expected to receive over the decades.

“Bob was pleased, of course, but very subdued,” said Simont, who lives in West Cornwall, Conn. “There are many people in the writing world, including some very good ones, who put a lot of meaning into what critics say about the implications of their work and all of that. Bob wouldn’t go for any of it.”

McCloskey’s island, Simont suggested, was a symbol of the private man himself.

“I think the island was the physical interpretation of what he wanted to be,” Simont said. “For a writer of all his success, living in a city would have meant attending dinners and social gatherings all the time. Some writers yearn for that acclaim, and when it finally comes, they relish it. But Bob always consciously avoided the results of his own success. He liked the simple life.”