Margaret Wise Brown

American · 1910 to 1952

Born Margaret Wise Brown on May 23, 1910, in Brooklyn, New York, to Robert Bruce Brown and Maude Margaret Johnson Brown, the granddaughter of the politician Benjamin Gratz Brown, she grew up unhappily between an absent, travelling father and a mother she found difficult, and was shuttled through a string of schools, a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and finally Hollins College in Virginia, where she graduated in 1932 with a degree in English. A teaching apprenticeship at the experimental Bank Street School put her under the wing of the educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, whose "here and now" philosophy, that small children want stories about the world directly in front of them, a spoon, a room, a goodnight, rather than fairy tales set in faraway kingdoms, became the engine of Brown's whole career. Her first book, When the Wind Blew, appeared in 1937, and by the following year she was editing for the publisher William R. Scott, shepherding in a generation of writers while publishing her own work under her name and under the pseudonyms Golden MacDonald and Timothy Hay. The Runaway Bunny, a bedtime chase between a mother rabbit and her wandering child, came out in 1942, and Goodnight Moon, illustrated like most of her best-loved books by Clement Hurd, followed in 1947, distilling one hundred and thirty-one words into what may be the most recognisable bedtime ritual in American children's literature. Brown wrote fast, sold her manuscripts to the highest bidder, and carried on a long relationship with the poet and actress Blanche Oelrichs, known as Michael Strange, at their shared apartment on Gracie Square. In November 1952, newly engaged to James Stillman Rockefeller Jr., she was on a European book tour when she died in Nice, France, of an embolism after kicking her leg to show a nurse how well she felt after surgery. She was forty-two. Her royalties went to a neighbour's nine-year-old son, and more than seventy manuscripts were unpublished at her death.