Margaret Wise Brown

Margaret Wise Brown
Margaret Wise Brown by Consuelo Kanaga Brooklyn Museum
Born	May 23, 1910 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Died	November 13, 1952(1952-11-13) (aged 42) Nice, France
Cause of death	Embolism
Pen name	Timothy Hay Golden MacDonald Juniper Sage (with Edith Thacher Hurd)
Occupation	Writer, editor
Nationality	American
Education	Dana Hall School, 1928
Alma mater	Hollins College, 1932
Genre	Children's literature
Notable works	Goodnight Moon The Runaway Bunny The Color Kittens
Partner	Blanche Oelrichs James Stillman 'Pebble' Rockefeller Jr.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd.

Life and career

Brown was the middle child of three whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.^[1] She was the granddaughter of Benjamin Gratz Brown. In 1923 she attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland,^[2][3] while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut. In 1925 she attended The Kew-Forest School.^[4] 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.^[5]

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English^[1] 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."^[6] This philosophy influenced Brown's work; she was also inspired by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose literary style influenced Brown's own writing.^[6]

Brown's first published children's book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers. Brown went on to develop her Here and Now stories, and later the Noisy Book series while employed as an editor at W. R. Scott. 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^[6] accepted the offer. Stein's book The World is Round,^[7] 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."^[8] (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" (coopted from her friend's handyman^[5]) and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. (Weisgard was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1946, and he won the 1947 Medal, for Little Lost Lamb and The Little Island. Two more of their collaborations appeared in 1953 and 1956, after Brown's death.) 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.^[9] She dated, for some time, an unknown "good, quiet man from Virginia",^[10] had a long-running affair with William Gaston,^[11][12] and had a summer romance with Preston Schoyer.^[13] In the summer of 1940 Brown began a long-term relationship with Blanche Oelrichs (nom de plume Michael Strange), poet/playwright, actress, and the former wife of John Barrymore. The relationship, which began as a mentoring one, eventually became romantic, and included co-habitating at 10 Gracie Square in Manhattan beginning in 1943.^[14] 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.^[15] To Bank Street friends she was "Brownie".^[16] To William Gaston she was "Goldie", in keeping with the use of Golden MacDonald as author of The Little Island.^[12]

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 suffering from appendicitis. Kicking up her leg to show the doctor how well she was feeling caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge and travel to her heart.^[17]

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.^[17]

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 Wise Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss.^[18]

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.^[19]

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 (Harper Paperbacks, 1999), Jill C. Wheeler (Checkerboard Books, 2006) and Amy Gary (Flatiron Books, 2017).^[20] There is a Freudian analysis of her "classic series" of bunny books by Claudia H. Pearson, Have a Carrot (Look Again Press, 2010).^[21]

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

Big Red Barn (reissue), illustrated by Felicia Bond

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 (Harper & Brothers, 1937) — re-issued by HarperCollins in 1986 illus. Geoffrey Hayes
• Bumble Bugs and Elephants: a Big and Little Book, illus. Clement Hurd (W. R. Scott, 1938)
• The Little Fireman, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina (W. R. Scott, 1938)
• Noisy Book series
  • The Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1939)
  • The Country Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1940)
  • The Seashore Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1941)
  • The Indoor Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1942)
  • The Winter Noisy Book, illus. Charles Green Shaw (W. R. Scott, 1947)
  • The Quiet Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Harper, 1950)
  • The Summer Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Harper, 1951)
• Baby Animals, illus. Mary Cameron (Random House, 1941)
• The Runaway Bunny, illus. Clement Hurd (Harper, 1942)
• Don't Frighten the Lion, illus. H. A. Rey (Harper, 1942)
• Big Dog, Little Dog, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1943) ‡
• Horses, illus. Dorothy F. Wagstaff (Harper, 1944), as by "Timothy Hay" and "Wag", OCLC 5047734
• Red Light Green Light, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Doubleday, 1944) ‡
• A Child's Good Night Book , illus. Jean Charlot (W. R. Scott, 1944)
• They All Saw It, illus. Ylla (Harper, 1944)
• The Little Fisherman, illus. Dahlov Ipcar (W. R. Scott, 1945). Reissued 2015.
• Little Lost Lamb, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Doubleday, 1945) ‡
• The Little Island, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Doubleday, 1946) ‡
• Little Fur Family, illus. Garth Williams (Harper, 1946)
• The Man in the Manhole and the Fix-It Men, illus. Bill Ballantine (New York: W. R. Scott, 1946), written by Brown and Edith Thacher Hurd as "Juniper Sage", OCLC 1698467
• Goodnight Moon, illus. Clement Hurd (Harper, 1947)
• ' 'The Golden Sleepy Book, illus. Garth Williams (Golden Classic, 1948)
• The Golden Egg Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Little Golden Books, 1947)
• The Sleepy Little Lion, illus. Ylla (Harper, 1947)
• The Important Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Harper, 1949)
• The Little Cowboy, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina (W. R. Scott, 1948)
• The Little Farmer, illus. Esphyr Slobodkina (W. R. Scott, 1948)
• Wait till the Moon is Full, illus. Garth Williams (Harper, 1948)
• The Color Kittens, illus. Alice and Martin Provensen (Little Golden Books, 1949)
• Two Little Miners, with Edith Thacher Hurd, illus. Richard Scarry (Little Golden Books, 1949)
• My World, illus. Clement Hurd (Harper, 1949)
• O Said the Squirrel, illus. Ylla (London: Harvill Press, 1950)
• Fox Eyes, illus. Garth Williams (Pantheon Books, 1951)
• The Duck, illus. Ylla (Harper; Harvill, 1952)
• Mister Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself, illus. Garth Williams (Little Golden Books, 1952)
• "Doctor Squash, The Doll Doctor", illus David Hitch (Random House, Inc, 1952)

References

Notes

Bibliography

• "Beyond the Top 50: Toddler Tales", USA Today (September 12, 1996).
• "Brown, Margaret Wise 1910-1952". Something About the Author vol. 100 (1999), pp. 35–39.
• Churnin, Nancy. "Goodnight and Sweet Dreams", The Dallas Morning News (January 5, 2001).
• Fleischman, John. "Shakespeare of the Sandbox Set", Parents vol. 63 (July 1988), pp. 92–96.
• Gaston, Bibi. The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home, William Morrow (2008). ISBN 978-0-06-085770-7
• Groth, Chuck. "An Heirloom for Fans of Goodnight Moon", St. Louis Post-Dispatch (February 19, 1995).
• Hurd, Clement. "Remembering Margaret Wise Brown", Horn Book (October 1983).
• Marcus, Leonard S., Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, Beacon Press (February 1992). ISBN 978-0-8070-7048-2
• Mainiero, Lina. "Margaret Wise Brown." American Women Writers: Volume 1. Frederick Unger Press. (1979), pp. 254 - 257.
• Mitchell, Lucy Sprague Mitchell. "Margaret Wise Brown, 1910-1952", Bank Street (1953).
• Pate, Nancy. "Good Gosh: Goodnight Moon is 50", Orlando Sentinel (February 24, 1997).
• Pearson, Claudia (2010). Have a Carrot: Oedipal Theory and Symbolism in Margaret Wise Brown's Runaway Bunny Trilogy. Look Again Press. ISBN 978-1-4524-5500-6.
• Pichey, Martha. "Bunny Dearest", Vanity Fair (December 2000), pp. 172–87.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Margaret Wise Brown.

• Official website
• MWB– maintained by a fan
• Runaway Bunny Concerto
• Margaret Wise Brown at Library of Congress Authorities, with 247 catalog records
• Timothy Hay, Golden MacDonald, and Juniper Sage at LC Authorities, with catalog records