[2] For 83 years (as of October 4, 2024), it has sold over 25 million copies, and has been translated into various different languages such as Japanese, French, Afrikaans, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Chinese, Danish, and Norwegian.

[5] However, Margret Rey's name did not appear on early copies of Curious George because the publisher felt that children's literature was too dominated by women.

After having a meal and smoking a pipe, George becomes tired and falls asleep in his bed in large, human-sized pajamas.

After the signal highlights George's location on the map, the firemen rush on their fire engines to The Man's house.

George is able to slip past and escape through the open door and climbs onto the roof, walking across the power lines above a guard's head.

Ultimately, children relate to this character because he, like them, "impulsively breaks commonsense rules set by grown-ups in a desire to understand the marvelous new world around him".

[9] Critic Shannon Maughan of Publishers Weekly claims this book can be used by teachers to help promote conservation of forests and the species inside of them.

[citation needed] In author Rivka Gachen's New Yorker piece, she found contradictory parallels in Curious George to the Middle Passage and the "reassuring and almost fantastical sense of wealth".

Gachen claims the idea that a monkey being taken from Africa and almost drowning in the Atlantic Ocean can be very closely paralleled with the Middle Passage.

In this way, Cummins concludes, the Curious George series portrays and excuses both imperialism and colonialism, and reflects the cultural ambivalence that many Americans display towards the nation's history of slavery.

[12] In her book tracing themes of racism, colonialism, and American exceptionalism in the Curious George series, author Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre also argues for a postcolonial reading of Curious George and contends that the series should be framed as a "classic example of colonial children's literature".

Having been raised in the cosmopolitan city of Hamburg (and its suburb Altona) and later spending time in England, Brazil, and France, the Rey's were both polyglots, with Margret achieving fluency in three languages and Hans in "no fewer than four".

Professor Yulia Komska notes that, despite the authors' self-professed multilingual backgrounds, the Curious George series is monolingual and features a monkey who cannot speak.