While her reputation today is firmly anchored in the perennial favorites Goodnight Moon , and Runaway Bunny, she has a number of other books which I believe are easily a match of these including Big Red Barn, Wait Till the Moon is Full, Four Fur Feet, The Little Fir Tree and The Noisy Book.
Unlike some of the other authors we have recently featured, Margaret Wise Brown was born into a comfortably middle class home on May 23rd, 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, one of three children. She was raised on Long Island, other than three years when her parents were stationed in India and she attended boarding school in Switzerland. She graduated from Hollins College in 1932 with a degree in English.
By all accounts (there is a good biography by Leonard S. Marcus entitled Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon), Ms. Brown was a purposeful livewire. In 1935 she enrolled in a teacher training program at New York's Bank Street College of Education which was administered by an innovator in children's education, Lucy Sprague Mitchell. One of the core principals that Mitchell espoused and which Brown adopted in her story writing, was the Here and Now philosophy. Up until this period children's writing was characterized by the objective of producing students taught through exposure to fairy tales and myths and legends (James Baldwin, to be featured in an upcoming Pigeon Post, would be a good example). Mitchell argued that children under six were much more responsive to stories that were based in the child's real world and were appropriate to the child's level of development. By extension, authors were invited to involve the children in the process of writing stories.
In 1938, Margaret Wise Brown was one of the moving forces behind the establishment of William R. Scott, Inc. a publisher of children's books grounded in the Here and Now philosophy. She worked there as an editor till 1942, all the while publishing her own books as well. Ms. Brown was an innovator in publishing beyond just the application of the Here and Now philosophy. She felt that illustrator's were dealt with inequitably and insisted that they receive the same royalty arrangements that she had as writer (rather than a set fee as was the common practice at that time). She worked with some of the most accomplished illustrators of the period including Clement Hurd, Garth Williams and Leonard Wiesgard.
Ms. Brown apparently woke one morning in 1945 with the idea for the story of Goodnight Moon already in her head, wrote it down, called her publisher and read it to her, and had the book accepted on the spot. It was however, another couple of years before it was in print. Clement Hurd had illustrated her earlier hit, Runaway Bunny, and she wanted him to illustrate Goodnight Moon as well. He was at that time still overseas doing military service in the Pacific and it was not till his return in 1946 that he was able to begin work.
In her personal life, Margaret Wise Brown had a wide circle of friends and a dramatic perspective about how to live life. She was generous in her gestures and developed close friendships with many of the social names of the time in addition to those in the writing/publishing worlds. She maintained an East Side apartment as her residence, an additional house for writing and entertaining guests, Cobble Court, in New York as well as her summer house, Only House, in Maine.
Her goal, she once said of her readers, was to "lift him for a few minutes from his own problems of shoelaces that won't tie, and busy parents and mysterious clock time, into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of a story."
Margaret Wise Brown died November 13, 1952 in southern France. She had been on a book tour when she underwent a routine appendectomy. She characteristically demonstrated her full recovery to her doctors by doing some can-can dance maneuvers but subsequently suffered an embolism from a dislodged blood clot. She had been engaged to marry James Stillman Rockefeller, Jr. at the time of her death.
With such a prolific author, it is natural that there should be some variation in quality across the titles. This issue is exacerbated by two additional complications. Some of her great books have been re-released with new illustrations; sometimes this is an improvement, sometimes the results are more questionable. Further, having left so many unpublished manuscripts and given her enduring popularity, there have been a number of releases of titles that were not published in her life - again sometimes the result is a delight and sometimes one is left with the impression that the manuscript was more a work in progress rather than a ready for release story. All this is to say that across the dozens of titles available, it is worth starting with the best and working into the others once you know that you like her style. A library well-stocked with her titles is of course the best way to ensure that you are finding the ones that most appeal to you.
Many of her books are now being re-released and many more children being introduced to her works but for generations to come, children will still go off to bed with the gentle cadences of "In the great green room…"
Given how many books she wrote in her lifetime and how many unpublished manuscripts are being dug out of old folders and published posthumously for the first time, it is quite challenging to identify a complete bibliography as we usually do in the Featured Author essays.
Below, instead, is a complete list of Margaret Wise Browns books that are still in print at this point in time, still an extensive list of forty-two books. The first dozen are the ones we think will be most popular among the widest range of young children. A couple of her best books are only sporadically in print, but you might want to keep your eyes open in used bookstores for Four Fur Feet and for The Noisy Book.
Books with a detailed TTMD review and tagging are marked with an asterisk.
Picture Books
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd |
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd |
The Little Island* by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leonard Wiesgard |
Wait Till the Moon is Full by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams |
The Little Fur Family* by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams |
The Good Little Bad Little Pig* by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Dan Yaccarion |
The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leonard Wiesgard |
The Golden Egg Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leonard Wiesgard |
Sneakers the Seaside Cat by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Anne Mortimer |
Big Red Barn* by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Felecia Bond |
The Little Fir Tree by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Jim Lamarche |
A Child's Goodnight Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Jean Charlot |
A Child is Born by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Floyd Cooper |
A Pussycat's Christmas by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Anne Mortimer |
Another Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Christopher Raschka |
Bumble Bugs and Elephants by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd |
Bunny's Noisy Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Lisa McCue |
Christmas in the Barn by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Diane Goode |
Give Yourself to the Rain by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Teri L. Weidner |
Goodnight Moon 123 by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd |
Home for a Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams |
I Like Bugs by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by G. Brian Karas |
I Like Stars by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Joan Paley |
Mister Dog by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams |
Mouse of My Heart by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Loretta Krupinski |
My World by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd |
My World of Color by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Loretta Krupinski |
Nibble Nibble by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Wendell Minor |
Robin's Room by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Steve Johnson |
Sailor Boy Jig by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Dan Andreasen |
Seven Little Postmen by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Edith Thacher Hurd |
Sheep Don't Count Sheep by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Benrei Huang |
Sleepy ABC by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina |
The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen |
The Dirty Little Boy by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Steven Salerno |
The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Richard Egielski |
The Golden Sleepy Book by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams |
The Little Scarecrow Boy by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by David Diaz |
The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams |
The Wonderful House by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by J.P. Miller |
Two Little Gardeners by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Gertrude Elliot |
Two Little Trains by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leo & Diane Dillon |
Where Have You Been? by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leo & Diane Dillon |
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