Margaret Wise Brown
Margaret Wise Brown was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements.
Life and career
Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York, the middle child of three of Maude Margaret and Robert Bruce Brown. She was the granddaughter of politician Benjamin Gratz Brown. Her parents suffered from an unhappy marriage. She was initially raised in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and in 1923, attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut. In 1925, she attended The Kew-Forest School. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.Brown was a lifelong avid beagler and was noted for her ability to keep pace, on foot, with the hounds.
Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher and also studied art. While working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City she started writing books for children. Bank Street promoted a new approach to children's education and literature, emphasizing the real world and the "here and now." This philosophy influenced Brown's work; she was also inspired by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose literary style influenced Brown's own writing.
Brown's first published children's book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers. Impressed by Brown's "here and now" style, W. R. Scott hired her as his first editor in 1938. Through Scott, she published the Noisy Book series among others. As editor at Scott, one of Brown's first projects was to recruit contemporary authors to write children's books for the company. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Brown's hero Gertrude Stein accepted the offer. Stein's book The World is Round was illustrated by Clement Hurd, who had previously teamed with Brown on W. R. Scott's Bumble Bugs and Elephants, considered "perhaps the first modern board book for babies." Brown and Hurd later teamed on the children's book classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, published by Harper. In addition to publishing a number of Brown's books, under her editorship W. R. Scott published Edith Thacher Hurd's first book, Hurry Hurry, and Esphyr Slobodkina's classic Caps for Sale.
From 1944 to 1946, Doubleday published three picture books written by Brown under the pseudonym "Golden MacDonald" and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. The Little Fisherman, illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar, was published in 1945. The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Early in the 1950s she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series, including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog, and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.
Personal life and death
While at Hollins she was briefly engaged. She dated, for some time, an unknown "good, quiet man from Virginia", had a long-running affair with William Gaston, and had a summer romance with Preston Schoyer. In the summer of 1940 Brown began a long-term relationship with Blanche Oelrichs, poet/playwright, actress, and the former wife of John Barrymore. The relationship, which began as a mentoring one, eventually became romantic, and included co-habiting at 10 Gracie Square in Manhattan beginning in 1943. As a studio, they used Cobble Court, a wooden house later moved to Charles Street. Oelrichs, who was 20 years Brown's senior, died in 1950.Brown went by various nicknames in different circles of friends. To her Dana School and Hollins friends she was "Tim", as her hair was the color of timothy hay. To Bank Street friends she was "Brownie". To William Gaston she was "Goldie", in keeping with the use of Golden MacDonald as author of The Little Island.
In 1952, Brown met James Stillman 'Pebble' Rockefeller Jr. at a party, and they became engaged. Later that year, while on a book tour in Nice, France, she died at 42 of an embolism, shortly after surgery for an ovarian cyst. Kicking up her leg to show her nurses how well she was feeling caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge and travel to her heart.
By the time of Brown's death, she had authored well over one hundred books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House", in Vinalhaven, Maine.
Legacy
Brown bequeathed the royalties to many of her books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny to Albert Clarke, the son of a neighbor who was nine years old when she died. In 2000, reporter Joshua Prager detailed in The Wall Street Journal the troubled life of Mr. Clarke, who has squandered the millions of dollars the books have earned him and who believes that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss.Brown left behind over 70 unpublished manuscripts. After unsuccessfully trying to sell them, her sister Roberta Brown Rauch kept them in a cedar trunk for decades. In 1991, her future biographer Amy Gary of WaterMark Inc., rediscovered the paper-clipped bundles, more than 500 typewritten pages in all, and set about getting the stories published.
Many of Brown's books have been re-issued with new illustrations decades after their original publication. Many more of her books are still in print with the original illustrations. Her books have been translated into several languages; biographies on Brown for children have been written by Leonard S. Marcus, Jill C. Wheeler and Amy Gary. There is a Freudian analysis of her "classic series" of bunny books by Claudia H. Pearson, Have a Carrot.
In popular culture
A fictional version of Brown occurs in Sarah Jio's 2014 novel Goodnight June. In the book a series of letters between Brown and the character Ruby Crain are used to show how Crain's friendship with Brown and her Seattle, Washington bookstore were influential in the writing of Goodnight Moon.Selected works
During her lifetime, Brown essentially had four publishers: Harper & Brothers, W. R. Scott, Doubleday, and Little Golden Books. The books written for Doubleday were published under the pseudonym "Golden MacDonald". All were unpaged picture books illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. Two appeared after her death.- When the Wind Blew, illus. Rosalie Slocum — re-issued by HarperCollins in 1986 illus. Geoffrey Hayes
- Bumble Bugs and Elephants: a Big and Little Book, illus. Clement Hurd
- The Little Fireman, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina
- Noisy Book series
- *The Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- * The Country Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- * The Seashore Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- * The Indoor Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- *The Noisy Bird Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- *The Winter Noisy Book, illus. Charles Green Shaw
- *The Quiet Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- *The Summer Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- Baby Animals, illus. Mary Cameron
- The Runaway Bunny, illus. Clement Hurd
- Don't Frighten the Lion, illus. H. A. Rey
- Big Dog, Little Dog, illus. Leonard Weisgard ‡
- Horses, illus. Dorothy F. Wagstaff, as by "Timothy Hay" and "Wag",
- Red Light Green Light, illus. Leonard Weisgard ‡
- A Child's Good Night Book , illus. Jean Charlot
- They All Saw It, illus. Ylla
- The Little Fisherman, illus. Dahlov Ipcar. Reissued 2015.
- Little Lost Lamb, illus. Leonard Weisgard ‡
- The Little Island, illus. Leonard Weisgard ‡
- Little Fur Family, illus. Garth Williams
- The Man in the Manhole and the Fix-It Men, illus. Bill Ballantine, written by Brown and Edith Thacher Hurd as "Juniper Sage",
- Goodnight Moon, illus. Clement Hurd
- The Golden Sleepy Book, illus. Garth Williams
- The Golden Egg Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- The Sleepy Little Lion, illus. Ylla
- The Important Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard
- The Little Cowboy, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina
- The Little Farmer, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina
- Wait till the Moon is Full, illus. Garth Williams
- The Color Kittens, illus. Alice and Martin Provensen
- Two Little Miners, with Edith Thacher Hurd, illus. Richard Scarry
- My World, illus. Clement Hurd
- O Said the Squirrel, illus. Ylla
- Fox Eyes, illus. Garth Williams
- The Duck, illus. Ylla
- Mister Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself, illus. Garth Williams
- Doctor Squash, The Doll Doctor, illus David Hitch
Published posthumously
- Little Frightened Tiger, illus. Leonard Weisgard ‡
- Scuppers The Sailor Dog, illus. Garth Williams
- Big Red Barn, illus. Rosella Hartman — re-issued by HarperCollins in 1989 illus. Felicia Bond
- The Little Brass Band, illus. Clement Hurd
- Three Little Animals, illus. Garth Williams
- Home for a Bunny, illus. Garth Williams
- Whistle for the Train, illus. Leonard Weisgard ‡
- The Dead Bird, illus. Remy Charlip, re-issued in 2016 with illustrations by Christian Robinson
- Under the Sun and the Moon and Other Poems, illus. Tom Leonard
- Sleepy ABC, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina
- Another Important Book, illus. Christopher Raschka
- Bunny's Noisy Book, illus. Lisa McCue
- The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin, illus. Richard Egielski
- The Fathers are coming home, illus. Stephen Savage
- Count to 10 with a mouse, illus. Kirsten Richards
- Goodnight Little One, illus. Rebecca Elliott
- The Diggers, illus. Antoine Corbineau
- One More Rabbit, illus. Emma Levey
- The Noon Balloon, illus. Lorena Alvarez
- Goodnight Songs, multiple illustrators
- Goodnight Songs: a Celebration of the Seasons,
- Love Song of the Little Bear, illus. Katy Hudson
- The Find It Book, illus. Lisa Sheehan
- Goodnight Little One, illus. Rebecca Elliot
- Good Day, Good Night, illus. Loren Long
- Be Brave, Little Tiger!, illus. Jeane Claude
- The Happy Little Rabbit'', illus. Emma Levey