According to Writer’s Almanac, children’s writer Margaret Wise Brown was born in Brooklyn (1910). She preferred playing outdoors to reading, but when she went on to boarding school and then to Hollins College in Virginia, she studied English and hoped to write literature for adults.

But then she went to teacher training college and got to work with little kids, and she was inspired by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, an education reformer who had an experimental school in New York City. Mitchell pioneered concepts that we take for granted now: considering student’s behavior, psychology, family life, and environment; interdisciplinary teaching; using creativity in the classroom; trying to figure out how each child learns best and teaching to that method. Mitchell was particularly interested in how young children absorb language, and felt that the language itself was important to them, not just what it communicated. And she thought that the experience of real life was enough for kids without fantasy. Mitchell took Brown under her wing, and then Brown took her ideas and wrote books that sounded good, that were soothing to children, that found the magic in their own realities: “Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.”

Goodnight Moon, reports the HarperCollins Children’s Books website, has sold over 16 million copies since it was first published. I imagine that Margaret Wise Brown never imagined that any of her books would ever have been this huge of a success.

Margaret Wise Brown wrote about 100 books, including the beloved Goodnight Moon (1947) and The Runaway Bunny (1942).

Margaret Wise Brown was stylish and beautiful. A 1946 profile of Brown in Life magazine said:

 

In addition to her solid claim to the title of World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer, Miss Brown, who is unmarried, is probably prettier than any of her competitors. She is a tall, green-eyed, ash blonde in her early 30s with a fresh outdoors look about her. People who meet her for the first time are likely to think she is extremely sophisticated, which is entirely true.

 

She had a series of lovers, both men and women, and in 1952 she got engaged. But she died later that same year, at the age of 42, of an embolism.

My daughters loved Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny when they were small. I must have read them aloud hundreds of times. We don’t always think about the writers behind these children’s classics or the lives they might have led. What was your favorite children’s book? Do you remember who wrote it?

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