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The Radical Woman Behind "Goodnight Moon"
Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.
Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “Wild Things,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”—just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “Goodnight Moon,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a fetish for fur, and hunted rabbits on weekends. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. At the age of forty-two, she died suddenly, in the South of France, after a clot cut off the blood supply to her brain.
Many readers now think of Brown titles like “The Runaway Bunny” as tranquil introductions to storytelling, but they were radical for their time. When Brown was emerging as a writer, in the nineteen-thirties, most books for young children drew on classic fables and folktales, providing moral instruction on each page. She rejected this orthodoxy in favor of stories that better reflected the preoccupations of young children, from sensual pleasures (the shape of an apple) to visceral emotions (fear of the dark). When boys and girls are first exposed to reading, Brown argued, they are most engaged by stories about “tables and chairs, plates and telephones, animals they know.” Even though her work embraced everyday subjects, it was far from banal. Brown incorporated influences from avant-garde literature, concentrating as much on the sound of words as on the words themselves. And she often commissioned illustrations from modernist painters who understood the allure of bold color. Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. Her books—including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year—delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.
Brown was born in Brooklyn in 1910, the second of three children. Her mother, Maude, was a homemaker who had dreamed of becoming an actress; according to Amy Gary, the author of a 2017 biography, “In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown,” Maude was prone to bouts of depression, sometimes refusing to leave her room. Brown’s father, Robert, was an executive at a company that manufactured twine. For most of her childhood, the family lived in a spacious house on Long Island, where she kept busy by chasing butterflies, reading Andrew Lang’s Rainbow fairy-tale collections, and “hitching up all the dogs I could find to pull me around on my sled in the snow.”
Brown’s brashness and tendency toward extremes were evident from a young age. She was a tomboy with a terrible temper. Gary writes that when Brown became angry she sometimes held her breath until she turned blue, prompting a nanny to plunge her head into a tub of ice-cold water. (Such dunkings, Gary notes, “had no lasting effect on Margaret’s innate stubborn streak.”) She and her sister, Roberta, engaged in a bedtime ritual of greeting the objects and the sounds around them and then bidding them good night. Brown had few friends her age, counting among her closest companions a cat, a collie, two squirrels, and dozens of rabbits. After one of the rabbits died, Brown skinned it. According to Roberta, her sister had once joked about becoming a “lady butcher.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/07/the-radical-woman-behind-goodnight-moon
Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “Wild Things,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”—just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “Goodnight Moon,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a fetish for fur, and hunted rabbits on weekends. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. At the age of forty-two, she died suddenly, in the South of France, after a clot cut off the blood supply to her brain.
Many readers now think of Brown titles like “The Runaway Bunny” as tranquil introductions to storytelling, but they were radical for their time. When Brown was emerging as a writer, in the nineteen-thirties, most books for young children drew on classic fables and folktales, providing moral instruction on each page. She rejected this orthodoxy in favor of stories that better reflected the preoccupations of young children, from sensual pleasures (the shape of an apple) to visceral emotions (fear of the dark). When boys and girls are first exposed to reading, Brown argued, they are most engaged by stories about “tables and chairs, plates and telephones, animals they know.” Even though her work embraced everyday subjects, it was far from banal. Brown incorporated influences from avant-garde literature, concentrating as much on the sound of words as on the words themselves. And she often commissioned illustrations from modernist painters who understood the allure of bold color. Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. Her books—including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year—delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.
Brown was born in Brooklyn in 1910, the second of three children. Her mother, Maude, was a homemaker who had dreamed of becoming an actress; according to Amy Gary, the author of a 2017 biography, “In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown,” Maude was prone to bouts of depression, sometimes refusing to leave her room. Brown’s father, Robert, was an executive at a company that manufactured twine. For most of her childhood, the family lived in a spacious house on Long Island, where she kept busy by chasing butterflies, reading Andrew Lang’s Rainbow fairy-tale collections, and “hitching up all the dogs I could find to pull me around on my sled in the snow.”
Brown’s brashness and tendency toward extremes were evident from a young age. She was a tomboy with a terrible temper. Gary writes that when Brown became angry she sometimes held her breath until she turned blue, prompting a nanny to plunge her head into a tub of ice-cold water. (Such dunkings, Gary notes, “had no lasting effect on Margaret’s innate stubborn streak.”) She and her sister, Roberta, engaged in a bedtime ritual of greeting the objects and the sounds around them and then bidding them good night. Brown had few friends her age, counting among her closest companions a cat, a collie, two squirrels, and dozens of rabbits. After one of the rabbits died, Brown skinned it. According to Roberta, her sister had once joked about becoming a “lady butcher.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/07/the-radical-woman-behind-goodnight-moon
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