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'Goodnight Moon' has comforted kids at bedtime for 75 years

Elizabeth Blair

Without mystery, hero, handsome prince or fairy godmother — Goodnight Moon has now lulled millions of children to sleep, in more than two dozen languages, for 75 years.

Written by Margaret Wise Brown, with illustrations by Clement Hurd, the picture book, which has sold more than 40 million copies since its publication on Sept. 3, 1947, wins its readers with a soothing series of goodnights to the everyday objects in "the great green room" before bedtime.

"It mirrors what's happening for the child, but it also gives them a feeling of some other world, something else that's sort of a larger, more peaceful world," says Thacher Hurd, Clement's son and himself a children's book author and illustrator.

Today it's considered a classic but Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon was not an overnight sensation. HarperCollins hide caption

Today it's considered a classic but Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon was not an overnight sensation.

"'Good night stars and good night air. Good night noises everywhere.' It's very expansive. You don't even think about it, but it is extremely sort of open and wide and a big feeling to it," reflects Hurd.

Goodnight Moon has been adapted for stage and screen, been featured on The Simpsons , parodied , and given a special reading by LeVar Burton to Neil deGrasse Tyson. To celebrate its 75th anniversary, HarperCollins is publishing a special slipcase edition with a new foreword by Thacher Hurd.

But the now iconic picture book was by no means an overnight sensation. Hard to believe — but in 1947 this innocent bedtime ritual was considered revolutionary.

Fairy tales versus the here-and-now

Once upon a time, librarians set the standard for what books children should read. For decades, they believed classic fairy tales and fantasy were best for young minds, says children's book historian Leonard Marcus. They favored stories, he explains, "that transported children out of the everyday world and enriched and cultivated their imagination."

By contrast , Brown brought children into a world they might know.

" Goodnight Moon was one of the first books for young children that focused on the everyday and recognized its value and significance for young children," says Marcus, author of Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon .

Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's classic Goodnight Moon has been translated into more than 25 languages and sold millions of copies since it was published 75 years ago. HarperCollins hide caption

In 1935, Brown began a long association with the progressive Bank Street school in New York City. Founded by educator and writer Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Bank Street brought together psychologists, pediatricians, sociologists, and student teachers to explore how children learn. They collected data by observing and talking directly to the experts: the children themselves. Their findings are neatly summed up in the title of Mitchell's Here And Now Story Book .

Marcus says Bank Street practitioners learned that children, "want to know about the world they're in at the moment, starting with their own room and their own surroundings and their own street. The noises they hear, the airplanes that go overhead, the trains and cars that go by, they thought all those everyday things were wonderful from a from a young child's perspective."

The udder problem

Goodnight Moon had its own kind of "here-and-now" spirit. But for a children's book to be commercially successful in 1947, it needed the approval of the New York Public Library, namely its influential children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore.

Illustrator Clement Hurd collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on a number of children's books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny . Courtesy of Thacher Hurd hide caption

Illustrator Clement Hurd collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on a number of children's books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny .

Moore had an aversion to the progressives at Bank Street, something Goodnight Moon 's editor at Harper's, Ursula Nordstrom , knew first-hand. In 1945, Moore tried to prevent another book Nordstrom edited, E.B. White's Stuart Little , from being published. Moore was apparently disturbed at the thought of a mouse being born to a human.

Nordstrom, says Marcus, understood that Moore and other librarians "were very squeamish about bodily parts and physicality in general." So she told illustrator Clement Hurd to make small tweaks to a couple of the items in his vibrant and detailed "great green room."

In an early version of Hurd's artwork, the mouse was on the little bunny's bed and the cow jumping over the moon in the picture on the wall was anatomically correct with an udder. Take the mouse off the bed and remove the udder from the cow, Nordstrom advised. "She was on the alert," says Marcus. "She didn't want to deep six a book based on one or two details in the pictures."

Margaret Wise Brown didn't live long enough to see the phenomenal success of Goodnight Moon . She died in 1952 at age 42. HarperCollins hide caption

Margaret Wise Brown didn't live long enough to see the phenomenal success of Goodnight Moon . She died in 1952 at age 42.

When Goodnight Moon was published in 1947, reviews were generally positive. The Christian Science Monitor wrote, "in these days of hurry and strain, a book for little children which creates an atmosphere of peace and calm is something for which to be thankful." Kirkus Reviews called it a "really fresh idea."

But, despite Nordstrom's efforts, Moore was not impressed. The New York Public Library not only excluded Goodnight Moon from its recommended children's book list, it didn't even acquire it for the NYPL system.

"What they didn't understand was, [Brown] went straight to the child and that sort of basic human need," says Jean McGinley, vice president and associate publisher for HarperCollins' Children's Books. McGinley calls Brown a "trailblazer" who "broke a formula" and incorporated "social emotional learning...before anybody else."

Margaret Wise Brown was something of a glamourous, wild-child: a spirited, creative and experimental writer known for wearing furs and driving a convertible. She loved rabbits and kept them as pets. The Runaway Bunny is another Brown/Hurd collaboration. But she was also active in the sport of "beagling" in which runners race through the woods after beagles chasing down hares or rabbits — and not to kiss them goodnight. "She was not like a sweet, cute children's book writer," remarks Thacher Hurd wryly.

"I don't especially like children"

Commenting on the possible contradiction between creating cuddly bunny characters and hunting them for sport, Brown told Life magazine, "Well I don't especially like children, either," she continued, "at least not as a group. I won't let anyone get away with anything just because he is little."

But Brown expressed that she was very much in touch with her inner child. She once said that, to be a children's writer "one has to love not children but what children love." And Brown did understand and give children what they wanted. In addition to writing more than 100 stories for them, she championed and edited other children's book writers and illustrators. She introduced the board book after observing small children chew on pages, and picture books with fur and bells and other tactile sensations.

"A book can make a child laugh or feel clear-and-happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end," Brown once said . "It can jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar, 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 story. If I've been lucky, I hope I have written a book simple enough to come near to that timeless world."

Margaret Wise Brown never lived to see Goodnight Moon 's colossal success. In 1952, on a trip to Paris, she died suddenly from an embolism following an operation. She was 42 years old. Twenty years later, the New York Public Library acquired Goodnight Moon and eventually named it one of the " Books of the Century ."

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The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon”

By Anna Holmes

Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “ Wild Things ,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”—just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “ Goodnight Moon ,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a fetish for fur, and hunted rabbits on weekends. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. At the age of forty-two, she died suddenly, in the South of France, after a clot cut off the blood supply to her brain.

Many readers now think of Brown titles like “ The Runaway Bunny ” as tranquil introductions to storytelling, but they were radical for their time. When Brown was emerging as a writer, in the nineteen-thirties, most books for young children drew on classic fables and folktales, providing moral instruction on each page. She rejected this orthodoxy in favor of stories that better reflected the preoccupations of young children, from sensual pleasures (the shape of an apple) to visceral emotions (fear of the dark). When boys and girls are first exposed to reading, Brown argued, they are most engaged by stories about “tables and chairs, plates and telephones, animals they know.” Even though her work embraced everyday subjects, it was far from banal. Brown incorporated influences from avant-garde literature, concentrating as much on the sound of words as on the words themselves. And she often commissioned illustrations from modernist painters who understood the allure of bold color. Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. Her books—including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year—delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.

Brown was born in Brooklyn in 1910, the second of three children. Her mother, Maude, was a homemaker who had dreamed of becoming an actress; according to Amy Gary, the author of a 2017 biography, “ In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown ,” Maude was prone to bouts of depression, sometimes refusing to leave her room. Brown’s father, Robert, was an executive at a company that manufactured twine. For most of her childhood, the family lived in a spacious house on Long Island, where she kept busy by chasing butterflies, reading Andrew Lang’s Rainbow fairy-tale collections, and “hitching up all the dogs I could find to pull me around on my sled in the snow.”

Brown’s brashness and tendency toward extremes were evident from a young age. She was a tomboy with a terrible temper. Gary writes that when Brown became angry she sometimes held her breath until she turned blue, prompting a nanny to plunge her head into a tub of ice-cold water. (Such dunkings, Gary notes, “had no lasting effect on Margaret’s innate stubborn streak.”) She and her sister, Roberta, engaged in a bedtime ritual of greeting the objects and the sounds around them and then bidding them good night. Brown had few friends her age, counting among her closest companions a cat, a collie, two squirrels, and dozens of rabbits. After one of the rabbits died, Brown skinned it. According to Roberta, her sister had once joked about becoming a “lady butcher.”

As a teen-ager, Brown attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Massachusetts, and her diaries from that period are full of declarations of intense love for female friends. (Contemporary lesbian scholars often characterize such relationships as “romantic friendships.”) She frets about her weight and her “awful winter moods.”

In 1928, Brown enrolled at her mother’s alma mater, Hollins College, in Virginia. She starred in a student production of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play “The Lamp and the Bell,” which depicts a relationship between two women. Although Brown struggled in freshman English, she tore through the work of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf . Among the Woolf novels that she read at Hollins was “ The Waves ,” of which Woolf had professed, “My difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.”

Brown’s career began in New York in 1935, when she entered a teacher-training program at Bank Street, an experimental school of education then situated in Greenwich Village. She had been casting about since graduating from Hollins, taking writing and painting courses and unsuccessfully submitting short fiction to The New Yorker . She told a former teacher she felt like a bunch of peas that weren’t cooked yet “but are doing a lot of whirling about in the kettle.”

Bank Street was run by the formidable scholar Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who hoped to redefine early education by incorporating insights from the social sciences and from research into the lives of children. As Mitchell put it, she aimed to help aspiring teachers “develop a scientific attitude” and “express the attitude of the artist towards their work and towards life.”

Brown was not cut out to be a teacher. Evaluations of her work from 1936 reported that, though she showed a fascination with individual children, she appeared blind to group dynamics and struggled to stay focussed when leading a classroom. One instructor observed that Brown seemed fixated on “words and language,” as if she were more of a poet than a teacher. Another noted, “Much of the time Miss Brown seems to be in a day-dream.”

Brown, however, was drawn to Mitchell’s aggressive critique of traditional storytelling. Mitchell had published a controversial manifesto, in the “ Here and Now Story Book ,” arguing that children need stories anchored in the familiar before they can contend with fantasy or the unknown. “It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” she wrote. “The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness.” She went on, “Children do not find the unusual piquant until they are firmly acquainted with the usual; they do not find the preposterous humorous until they have intimate knowledge of ordinary behavior.” Mitchell maintained that the narrative and emotional interests of a two-year-old differ from those of, say, a seven-year-old, and that by analyzing these specific preferences scholars and writers could create texts for each stage of development.

The manifesto was the centerpiece of a children’s-literature class, taught by Mitchell, that Brown took at Bank Street. She was an immediate standout. “Probably she has the most consistent and genuine interest in language of the group,” Mitchell reported, in an evaluation. “Her product, though slight, always shows sensitivity to form, sound and rhythm.”

Mitchell insisted that a young child doesn’t really care about plot. When listening to a story, his enjoyment comes not from any awareness of “a beginning and a middle and an end” but from “the pleasure he gets in the action itself.” This insight may help explain the appeal of the so-called Here and Now approach for Brown, whose writing instructors had criticized her for failing to create narrative arcs or to convey human emotion. One of her Hollins professors had described her as loving words “as she loved sound and color,” but complained about her work ethic. It was as if Brown were refusing to be “bound by law and order.” (She confessed to another professor that she hated writing stories “with plots.”)

Brown was most taken by the idea of writing for five-year-olds. “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again,” she once wrote in a notebook. In a paper on the topic, she argued that a child of that age enjoys a “keenness and awareness” that will likely be subdued out of him later in life. She went on, “Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. . . . ‘Big as the whole world,’ ‘Deep as a giant,’ ‘Quiet as electricity rushing about the world,’ ‘Quiet as mud.’ All these are five-year-old similes. Let the grown-up writer for children equal or better them if he can.”

In Mitchell’s course, students were expected to write drafts of stories and read them aloud to children, taking notes on their reactions and their questions. Though Brown later said that her first effort was overcomplicated—“all decked out like a Christmas tree”—Mitchell was impressed, and she watched with satisfaction as Brown’s interactions with young readers pushed her beyond wordplay and poetry. Initially, Mitchell recalled, Brown “was indifferent, even impatient if asked to think in terms of the work-a-day world around her.” Mitchell continued, “She told me she liked trucks as ‘big, powerful, noisy colors in motion,’ but she ‘didn’t care where they were going or why.’ But, as she listened to children and watched their play, she found they did care about the work of trucks and all the busy machine and human workers around them. From children she gradually learned to find a new kind of magic in the work-a-day world.”

At the same time that Mitchell’s ideas inspired Brown, they offended one of the most powerful figures in American children’s literature: Anne Carroll Moore, the head of the children’s division at the New York Public Library. Moore, who believed in starting children off with Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter , was suspicious of the social sciences, and, like some of her fellow-librarians, she doubted whether meaningful children’s literature could be engineered through the empirical study of children. As Leonard S. Marcus records in his deeply reported 1992 biography, “ Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon ,” the two camps engaged in a decades-long standoff—often called the Fairy-Tale War. Moore believed that traditional myths and legends connected children with “higher truths,” and considered stories without morals to be a waste of time. Marcus notes that the library’s internal review of “Goodnight Moon” deemed it “unbearably sentimental.” The book didn’t appear on the shelves of city libraries until 1972—eleven years after Moore’s death, and twenty years after Brown’s.

When Brown started at Bank Street, she was living in an apartment in Greenwich Village. If she wasn’t in class, she was painting or was carousing with other young writers. She kept working on adult fiction, but she also wrote stories for children.

Brown was buoyed by Mitchell’s encouragement. Though writing children’s books was sometimes dismissed as women’s work, Brown knew that she had a talent for it. She sent a stack of manuscripts to Harper & Row, which accepted one of them, “The Blue-Grey Kitten.” (It was eventually published under the title “ When the Wind Blew .”) The book was a modest success. Upon receiving her first royalty check, Marcus writes, Brown bought an entire cart’s worth of flowers from a West Village vender, filled her apartment with blooms, and had friends over for a celebration.

In the late thirties, Mitchell invited Brown to become a founding member of the Bank Street Writers Lab, a group of about a dozen teacher trainees who shared “language data” and honed their writing voices. Mitchell, who recognized that Brown had a love of trial and error, much like she did, called her “a kind of scientist.” As Mitchell later wrote, she began to wonder whether this energetic young woman, with her “crazy, penetrating, blind instincts and feeling for language,” could write a best-seller that would bring the Here and Now aesthetic into the mainstream.

In the Writers Lab, Brown worked alongside a number of women who went on to publish children’s books, including Edith Thacher, with whom Brown eventually collaborated on “ Five Little Firemen ,” published in 1948. The book was imbued with the Here and Now movement’s respect for ordinary things: when a house fire starts, each member of the family inside retrieves something beloved—a pet, a few flowers—before rushing out.

Brown tested the limits of the Here and Now approach. One of her first published stories was inspired by the summer day during her childhood when she and two other girls discovered a dead bird. They took it into the woods and dug a grave, swaddled the bird in leaves, read a passage from the Bible, and sang a mournful song. They said that they hoped to come back every day with a clutch of fresh flowers. (They didn’t.) “The bird was dead when the children found it,” the story begins. “But it had not been dead for long—it was still warm.” Some of Brown’s associates reported feeling a “general revulsion” while reading the story. Even at progressive Bank Street, which offered courses in Freudian theory, depictions of death and sex in children’s literature were controversial.

Brown continued auditioning many other drafts. Studying the opinions and physical responses that her stories elicited made her feel like a literary detective; she called the exercise chasing “leads.” She later declared that children were the true authors of many of her books: she was “merely an ear and a pen.”

At times, when testing out stories on kids, Brown asked them to lie down on mats and free-associate with her. “What is the quietest and quickest thing you can think of?” she once asked. Among the responses: “a mouse sleeping”; “a pussy cat when it paddles its paws in the grass”; “I think of eggs. They don’t make any noise because they’re food.” One day, a boy objected to a line that she had written: “The stars come out.” Stars were always there, the boy explained. Brown conceded the point, and promised to “change it next time.”

She often summoned her childhood memories when writing drafts, but she also tried to reorient herself to the level of children or little animals. Occasionally, she’d even lie low on a patch of grass, to feel again what it was like to be very small. While working on “ The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile ” (1938), she wrote to her publisher that she was fascinated by children’s passionate engagement with smells and colors and sounds—“so fresh to their brand new senses.” When you talk to a child, she later told one of her former Hollins professors, “he may not be listening to you at all—he will just be feeling the fur collar on your coat.”

In 1937, Lucy Sprague Mitchell persuaded an independent publisher in New York, W. R. Scott, to begin acquiring children’s literature, and to hire Brown both as a writer and as the division’s editor. Brown immediately began incorporating her interest in modernism into the picture-book genre, which at the time was undergoing an artistic and pedagogical revolution.

As Brown later put it, she saw children’s literature as “one of the purest and freest fields for experimental writing.” Until the early forties, she continued attending the Writers Lab, where modernism was a frequent topic of conversation. Mitchell extolled how modernism allowed the reader to make “the interpretation for himself from the images evoked.” The group’s participants realized that many of the artistic techniques of modernist writers and artists—repetition, rhythm, absurdism, changes in perspective, a subjective point of view, a rejection of sentimentality—aligned not just with the Here and Now philosophy but also with the emotional and sensory interests of young children.

Brown once observed that Gertrude Stein shared with little kids an “accidental playfulness” with words. This feeling was a fundament of poetry. Children learning to speak, Brown later explained on a radio program, “sort of half-chant their ideas.” She continued, “If they like the sound of the words at all, they repeat them, and make a pattern of them.” Powerful picture-book writing, she said, depended on “writing words that will be heard.” This sensual enjoyment of language was evident in “ Bumble Bugs and Elephants, ” one of the first titles that Brown wrote and published for W. R. Scott. It employed a conceit that she returned to repeatedly—the juxtaposition of large and small—with a clever nod to a certain famous English fairy tale: “There were three little pigs . . . and a great big pig.”

In 1939, Brown wrote and published “ The Noisy Book, ” the story of a temporarily blind young dog, Muffin, who must rely on his hearing as he makes his way through the world with bandaged eyes. Brown did not heed the concerns of a staff psychologist at Bank Street, who expressed trepidation that the bandaged eyes evoked castration.

Brown was ecstatic when Gertrude Stein herself agreed to write a picture book, “ The World Is Round ,” for her imprint. The book is striking, in part because of its lack of punctuation: “Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals.” Critics have noted the influence of Steinian wordplay on several Brown works, including “ The Important Book ,” “ Four Fur Feet ,” and “ Red Light, Green Light ,” which features repeated variations on the sentences “Red light they can’t go. Green light they can.” Barbara Bader, a historian of children’s literature, has described “Goodnight Moon” as “abstract in form and concrete in substance,” and its prose as “closest to Gertrude Stein and to the utterances of children.”

The illustrations in “Bumble Bugs and Elephants” and “The World Is Round” were made by Clement Hurd, an American Fauvist who had studied with Fernand Léger and was known for his use of bright, flat colors. Brown met Hurd in 1938, after she saw a set of paintings that he’d done on the ceiling of a mutual friend’s Connecticut property. She asked if he’d consider doing some illustrations for her; in her view, children were often more accepting of Surrealist and abstract art than adults were. Hurd became a mainstay of Brown’s, executing the drawings for “Goodnight Moon” and “The Runaway Bunny,” among others. He tended to draw the animals in her stories in profile, and, in these works, one can trace the evolution of his pictorial style. The “great green room” in “Goodnight Moon” has been likened to Henri Matisse’s “ L’Atelier Rouge ,” and elements in “The Runaway Bunny” may have been inspired by Georges Seurat’s “ The Circus .”

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Brown’s most aesthetically provocative book was also one of her most adorable: in 1946, she published “ Little Fur Family ,” in collaboration with Garth Williams, who later illustrated E. B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web.” For the first edition of “Little Fur Family,” which had a print run of seventy-five thousand copies, Brown insisted that the book’s cover be wrapped entirely in the fur of New Zealand rabbits. The result prompted one child to try to feed his dinner to his copy of the book and another to offer her copy to a pet kitten as a companion. Marcus, the historian, told me that Brown’s use of real fur was quite possibly a nod to the work of the Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, who, for her 1936 work “Object (or Luncheon in Fur),” covered a teacup, a saucer, and a spoon with the fur of a gazelle. The book, like the leopard- and zebra-skin sofas that Brown bought to decorate her New York apartments, was mischievous, erotic, and a little sinister.

In 1942, Brown left W. R. Scott to become a full-time writer. She was developing a dreamy, melancholy, intuitive style—she’d call her stories “word patterns” or “interludes.” Though she continued to embrace elements of the Here and Now school—and collaborated with Mitchell on several titles, including “ Animals, Plants, and Machines ” and “ Farm and City ”—her more mature works incorporated elements of poetry and music, and had the intentional pacing of good theatre or ballet. Brown spoke of creating a “literature of the speaking voice, like the Bible,” with purposeful stops, starts, repetitions, and do-overs.

She sprinkled many of her stories with surprising non sequiturs or sophisticated phrases—children, she once said, want “a few gorgeous big grownup words to bite on.” In “ The Little Island ” (1946), Brown writes of “little waxy white-pink chuckleberry blossoms” and, a few pages later, meditates on the concept of faith. She delighted in making sensual observations. A shoe is “warm when you take it off.” A daisy has a “ticklish smell.” Seaweed squeaks. Brown also led children into existential terrain; among her preferred subjects were “getting lost and getting found” and “shyness and loneliness.” She once asked, “How can you have the here and now without an emotion?”

Brown usually took fifteen to twenty minutes to write the first draft of a story—they were often scrawled on the backs of envelopes or on shopping lists. She then took a year or two to massage the pacing and the timing of the text. She claimed that she never had “any idea at the beginning of a story of what the end will be.” Around 1940, Brown began psychoanalysis with Robert Bak—who later became the president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute—and she grew increasingly interested in interpreting her dreams. She came to believe that one of her main creative challenges as an artist was allowing her unconscious to erupt on the page—from the “child that is within all of us . . . perhaps the one laboratory that we all share.” In an undated note, she wrote, “Lewis Carroll dreamed most of his books.” In 1950, she published “ The Dream Book ,” which invited readers on a journey through the fantasies and fugues of various characters, animal and otherwise. In an essay on how to write for young children, she declared, “A child’s own story is a dream; but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.”

Brown’s papers are kept at Hollins University and at the Westerly Library, in Rhode Island. Letters and diaries written during her early adulthood in New York have a giddy energy. As she ages, she doesn’t lose her exuberance, but she becomes darker. In a series of letters to a female lover, she appears to threaten suicide. In a diary entry, she recounts a string of nightmares. Snippets of some of her unpublished work make the story of the dead bird feel tame: kittens are crushed in the hands of inattentive children; mice plummet to their death from the talons of raptors in flight.

The book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who worked with Brown on several of her most famous titles and referred to her as Miss Genius, later recalled Brown’s telling her that the very temperament that allowed her to write beautiful children’s books—her sensitivity to tremors of feeling—could also make her profoundly unhappy. As Brown once wrote, “The child had never known, the girl was never sure, the woman the longer she was herself, was least of all certain.”

Brown’s most productive period coincided with a time when she was at her most psychologically fragile. In 1940, she met Blanche Oelrichs, an actress, poet, and dilettante. Oelrichs went by the name Michael Strange—a nom de plume that she’d taken on in order to elicit from her editors a “fair opinion” of her poems.

Strange had grown up in New England society and was married to the actor John Barrymore from 1920 to 1928. A Profile in this magazine, published in 1927, described her as “full of Italy,” “highly emotional,” and “singularly impetuous and full of fire.” Sometimes Strange toured the country performing a show in which she read aloud Bible passages, and poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Walt Whitman, while a harp played in the background.

By the time Brown met Strange, who was twenty years her senior, Strange had married her third husband, a prominent lawyer, and was spending much of her time dining at women’s clubs and moaning away hangovers. They began a torrid affair. Eventually, Strange left her husband and persuaded Brown to move into an apartment across from hers, in a building on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion. The lovers entered and left each other’s residence as they pleased, and shared a butler named Pietro.

One of Brown’s diaries documents the first few years of the affair, a relationship that seems to have existed mostly after sundown, accompanied by House of Lords gin Martinis. (Brown and Strange were regulars at the Algonquin and Sardi’s.) The journal is often exhilarating to read. Many nights, Brown writes, the two wandered Manhattan like a pair of cats, their stroll interrupted by groups of flirtatious young men or passing taxi-drivers issuing dire warnings about “bad men lurking in doorways.” Walking with Strange down the dark city streets was, Brown writes, “a heightened experience”—even better than poetry.

Strange, whom Brown sometimes addressed as Sir Baby or as the Rabbit M.D.—Brown’s nickname was the Bun—could be cruel and spiteful. Brown writes in her diaries of “angry eyes dark and wild.” Weakness and self-doubt were anathema to Strange, who criticized Brown’s halting way of speaking and her interest in psychoanalysis, not to mention the way she prepared and served tea.

Most distressing, perhaps, was Strange’s apparent disdain for Brown’s profession as a children’s-book author. Brown had harbored doubts about the legitimacy of her work; someday, she said, she hoped to become a “real” writer. Although she never published a novel for adults, one of her most admired picture books, “The Runaway Bunny,” seems to slyly capture her rocky dynamic with Strange. Published in 1942, the story begins with the titular character announcing a plan to escape the clutches of a mother bunny. “If you run away, I will run after you,” the mother says. Attempting to flee, the little bunny morphs into other things: a fish, a bird, a sailboat. Eventually, exhausted by his mother’s good-natured pursuit, he surrenders: “Shucks. I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.” The story taps into a universal childhood longing for independence, but it can also be read as a metaphor for a stormy romance. Brown and Strange’s relationship remained turbulent, but they stayed together, on and off, until 1950, when Strange died, from leukemia.

In 1947, Brown published what is now her most famous book, “Goodnight Moon.” The action in this spare, poetic story about a bunny at bedtime is slow-moving, and the scene never really changes. As the young rabbit tosses and turns in a green-walled bedroom, saying good night to various things in the room—a mouse, a comb, a red balloon—Clement Hurd’s illustrations, in deep jewel tones, slowly dim, panel by panel, and a soft scrim of stars outside the window begins to brighten.

Through the years, “Goodnight Moon” has been imitated dozens of times; picture books aimed at helping children fall asleep are so common that they have spawned parodies, including the 2011 best-seller “ Go the Fuck to Sleep .” But none of these books come close to achieving the surreal quality of “Goodnight Moon,” which marries elements of the Here and Now movement with the feeling of a hallucinatory reverie. The book combines the virtues of her best work: inspired nonsense (“goodnight mush”), repetitive language, enveloping visuals. Marcus, in his biography of Brown, describes the book as “a cunning transparency of Bank Street ideas and their opposites.” In time, it became a breakout commercial success; it has now sold more than forty million copies.

“Goodnight Moon,” like many modernist works of art, is full of tantalizing ambiguities. Is the book’s wishing everything and everyone good night—“Goodnight nobody,” “Goodnight comb”—a meditation or an incantation? And who, exactly, is doing the wishing? Why is the doll house illuminated? Some of the strangest, most discomfiting aspects of the book are the panels in which an adult bunny sits quietly in a rocking chair on the far side of the room, knitting and observing the shadowy, flickering goings on. Like a ghost, she’s sometimes there and sometimes not.

One of the few living people who knew Brown well is James Stillman Rockefeller, Jr., her fiancé at the time of her death. Rockefeller was not with Brown in France when she died. She was on a solo vacation, and developed the blood clot soon after having emergency surgery, in Nice, for what was either an ovarian cyst or an inflamed appendix.

Rockefeller, known to his friends as Pebble, is now in his late nineties. He lives with his wife, Marilyn, on a large property outside Camden, Maine. I met with him there not long ago, and he showed me some photographs he had taken of Brown in 1952, when she was living at a summer house that she had bought on the nearby island of Vinalhaven. Her place there, which she called the Only House, had some of the uncanny touches of her picture books, including a door on the second floor which opened to the outside—even though there was no balcony.

In one of the photographs, Brown is nude, sunbathing on a rock beside a swimming hole. “She was so many different people that it’s hard to pin her down,” he said. “Who was she? What was she like? Those are difficult questions.” I asked Rockefeller, who met Brown at a party in Georgia months before she died, whether they had discussed having children. “She was so full in her own life,” Rockefeller said. “And yet there must have been a lack, somewhere along the line. But whether she would like an ordinary marriage, with children—I just couldn’t really see her in that.”

In the Life piece on Brown, from 1946, she proclaimed , “I don’t especially like children,” but she wrote of wanting to have some of her own before she turned thirty. Subtle assertions of her legacy appeared in The Hollins Alumnae Magazine —nestled among wedding and birth notices. In a note published in 1945, she wrote, “How many children have you? I have 50 books.”

Rockefeller gave me photocopies of half a dozen letters that Brown had written to him from the hospital in Nice. After her French vacation, she was planning to meet Rockefeller in Panama, where they would marry and then embark on a honeymoon on his boat, the Mandalay. One of the letters, apparently written soon after the surgery, said, “In spite of the chance that it might be other complications . . . my heart is more happy thinking that we might have conceived to-gether.” She went on, “Even if we lose it this time we know we can do it again.”

Two weeks later, on November 13, 1952, she was preparing to be discharged. As she reported in a letter to Rockefeller written that morning, she was to leave the hospital and be carried “in a sedan chair by four of the village boys” to the hilltop estate of a friend, Chateau Barlow, where she would continue her convalescence. When Brown, in a puckish effort to demonstrate her good health to the medical staff, kicked up her leg, can-can style, she dislodged a blood clot, blacked out, and died.

A few dozen yards away from Brown’s house in Vinalhaven, Rockefeller erected a headstone for her. The inscription was composed by Brown herself: “ MARGARET WISE BROWN / Writer of Songs and Nonsense.”

Obituaries were brief. The Times noted that she was “one of the most prolific writers of stories for the very young,” but made no serious claims about her literary merit. During the next decade, people who knew Brown began to contend that she was much more than a commercial success. In 1958, the influential children’s-book editor and critic Louise Seaman Bechtel published a fourteen-page appreciation of Brown in the journal The Horn Book , describing her as more poet than storyteller, and declaring her the “laureate of the nursery.”

A few days after visiting Rockefeller, I went to Brown’s island house, which he now owns. From time to time, his children use the property, which has undergone a few renovations: most notably, the upstairs door to nowhere has been turned into a bay window.

Inside, many of Brown’s belongings are still there. When I visited, her old Victrola had a record of Gene Krupa’s “Jeepers Creepers” on the turntable. Brown had filled the home with luxuries and curious objects, as if a Victorian-doll-house designer had collaborated with Magritte or Picasso. The living room contained a red velvet divan and ruby-colored oil lamps. There was no sign, however, of a set of bespoke chairs that Brown had installed: their legs had been shortened, to make the room feel bigger. Scanning the bookshelves, I saw titles by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lytton Strachey, and Michael Strange. I came across a white, cast-iron doorstop in the shape of a rabbit. Outside, I walked past a cold spring where Brown had stored butter and milk and champagne.

Soon after Brown met Rockefeller, she told him, “I hope to write something serious one day as soon as I have something to say.” By then, she had written about a hundred manuscripts. “But I am stuck in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one wants to move on.” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Bank Street school in the nineteen-thirties.

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GOODNIGHT MOON

by Margaret Wise Brown & illustrated by Clement Hurd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 1947

Little children will love this going to sleep book — a really fresh idea by a talented and prolific author, illustrated by Clement Hurd. In a soft sing-song, here is a bunny saying goodnight room, goodnight moon, goodnight to all the familiar objects in the softly lighted room. Then- as the room darkens, in successive pictures, the goodnight ceremony moves forward. The colors range from a bright, crisp red, green, yellow, to an almost black background. Despite the high price, which takes it out of the straight merchandise market, this is a good buy, from quality of text and pictures — and most of all, idea.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 1947

ISBN: 0060775858

Page Count: 40

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1947

CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S

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by Margaret Wise Brown ; illustrated by Greg Pizzoli

by Margaret Wise Brown ; illustrated by Jerry Pinkney

by Margaret Wise Brown ; illustrated by Loren Long

TALES FOR VERY PICKY EATERS

by Josh Schneider & illustrated by Josh Schneider ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2011

Broccoli: No way is James going to eat broccoli. “It’s disgusting,” says James. Well then, James, says his father, let’s consider the alternatives: some wormy dirt, perhaps, some stinky socks, some pre-chewed gum? James reconsiders the broccoli, but—milk? “Blech,” says James. Right, says his father, who needs strong bones? You’ll be great at hide-and-seek, though not so great at baseball and kickball and even tickling the dog’s belly. James takes a mouthful. So it goes through lumpy oatmeal, mushroom lasagna and slimy eggs, with James’ father parrying his son’s every picky thrust. And it is fun, because the father’s retorts are so outlandish: the lasagna-making troll in the basement who will be sent back to the rat circus, there to endure the rodent’s vicious bites; the uneaten oatmeal that will grow and grow and probably devour the dog that the boy won’t be able to tickle any longer since his bones are so rubbery. Schneider’s watercolors catch the mood of gentle ribbing, the looks of bewilderment and surrender and the deadpanned malarkey. It all makes James’ father’s last urging—“I was just going to say that you might like them if you tried them”—wholly fresh and unexpected advice. (Early reader. 5-9)

Pub Date: May 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-547-14956-1

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Clarion Books

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011

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by Josh Schneider ; illustrated by Josh Schneider

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BECAUSE I HAD A TEACHER

by Kobi Yamada ; illustrated by Natalie Russell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2017

A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.

A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.

This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.

Pub Date: March 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Compendium

Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017

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Why the unconventional bedtime tale Goodnight Moon endures 75 years on

Though it's now a classic, margaret wise brown's clever, boldly illustrated book was no overnight success.

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Goodnight Moon was a sleeper hit.

Margaret Wise Brown's now-classic picture book about a bunny saying goodnight to everything it sees — bears in chairs, a red balloon, the bowl of mush and, of course, the moon — was slow to find a home on bedside tables when it was published in September 1947.

With its simple language, lulling rhythm and boldly coloured illustrations of the great green room by Clement Hurd, it was a departure from the moralistic fairy tales and fantasies en vogue at the time. 

"It does feel like a kind of incantation," said Lissa Paul, director of the PhD program in interdisciplinary humanities at Brock University.

"One of the things that makes it such a perennially beautiful book is that the rhythms and cadences of bedtime are perfectly caught in it."

Despite the fact that Goodnight Moon has sold more than 40 million copies and continues to top best-seller lists, it was a new concept for children's literature when it was first published 75 years ago. 

"I think deep down [Brown] understood that what she was doing was significant and that she was reaching young children in a way that had probably never happened before in books," said Leonard Marcus, author of the biography Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon.

"At the same time, she was part of her time and children's books were viewed as second rate in terms of artistic achievement in general, and the books for babies were at the low, low end of that spectrum."

Understanding children's needs

Brown was a poet by "temperament," according to Marcus, and had ambitions to write for the New Yorker. She struggled, however, to write for adults, the biographer said. 

When she landed at what is now known as the Bank Street College of Education by chance, she found her niche, he told The Sunday Magazine .

Bank Street taught progressive approaches to educating children and favoured the idea that books had a place in the very beginning of children's lives. 

There, Marcus said she wrote stories for students in the nursery school, gathering feedback from the children themselves. It was their worldview and desires that influenced the stories she told. 

The writer once said that children were looking for "a few gorgeous big grownup words to bite on," wrote Anna Holmes in the New Yorker .

"Although she was bringing the Bank Street pieces into her understanding of children and childhood, she was also bringing in her own upbringing and love of literature," said Paul.

In Goodnight Moon, Brown eschewed the fantastical worlds of then-contemporary children's literature and instead embraced the usual elements of a young person's world (though her defining work undoubtedly includes some quirky elements), experts said. 

"Part of what made her work special was the emotional truthfulness of it," said Marcus.

Reflecting cultural views

Despite its popularity among children, Goodnight Moon was seen as a poor choice for kids. 

Anne Carroll Moore, an influential librarian who headed the children's department at the New York Public Library, withheld Goodnight Moon from its collection . A review by the library described it as "unbearably sentimental," and it wouldn't appear on shelves in the system until 1972. 

"The library philosophy really was rooted in a sense of the importance of protecting children from the harsh realities of life," said Marcus.

Children's books often reflect cultural views of the time they're published, says Theresa Rogers, a professor of education at the University of British Columbia. They also tend to centre on innocence.

"These kinds of concepts about children play a pretty large role in what gets written for children," she said.

I still read it to my grandchildren, I read it to my kids — and it stands the test of time. - Theresa Rogers, professor of education

But just as there are prevailing views, there are also competing ones, says Rogers.

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, a "deeply psychological book" that acknowledged the fears and trepidations of children, was similarly controversial when it was released in 1963.

While libraries didn't stock Goodnight Moon in its early days, it gained popularity when two psychologists known for their syndicated advice column praised the book in the early 1950s. The authors wrote that "it seems almost unlawful that you can hypnotize a child off to sleep as easily as you can by reading this small classic," the Wall Street Journal reported . 

"It was the beginning of a grassroots movement in support of that book, which essentially went over the heads of the librarians who were the self-appointed experts and arbiters of the time," said Marcus.

The New York Public Library acknowledged in a 2020 article that had it not been for the librarian's decision to keep Goodnight Moon off the shelves, it  would have likely been the library's most borrowed book .

Bedtime staple to this day

Brown died in 1952 at the age of 42. Before her death, she had written notes about a potential Broadway musical that Marcus believes she would have eventually written. 

Several of her manuscripts were also posthumously published.

Over seven decades since the groundbreaking Goodnight Moon was released, experts and readers alike say that Brown's work endures.

• Why Goodnight Moon didn't make New York Public Library's list of most checked-out books

Goodnight Moon stands as an example of blending literature with what children need, says Paul, noting that many of today's children's books, such as levelled readers, are more focused on teaching the structure of language and literacy but are written in an unnatural way.

"All of the kinds of words that people don't use about literacy, education, are words that are in Margaret Wise Brown and in the feeling generated in Margaret Wise Brown — ideas of love, desire, observation, care, attending to the way that language actually communicates that there's something you love and want to share with someone else," she said. 

Even in a world where seemingly limitless books exist, Goodnight Moon remains a bedtime staple.

"It's often given as a book to read to kids, still, along with the much more clever, sophisticated, postmodern, interactive range of books and vast number of topics that are available now," said Rogers.

"I still read it to my grandchildren, I read it to my kids — and it stands the test of time."

Interview with Leonard Marcus produced by Sarah-Joyce Battersby.

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‘Goodnight Moon’: 75 years in the great green room

• Deep Read ( 6 Min. )
• By Harry Bruinius Staff writer @HarryBruinius

September 1, 2022

When Kenny Varner attended the 60th birthday party of a family member recently, he was somewhat startled after the conversation turned to the enduring appeal of “Goodnight Moon.”

"Family members and other folks, from the ages of 5 to over 90, all began to share memories of the importance of this book, both in their own childhoods and now and with who they are as parents," says Dr. Varner.

Why We Wrote This

There’s nothing quite as delightful as curling up with a young child and a bedtime story. For 75 years, millions of families have found everyday joy by reading Margaret Wise Brown’s classic “Goodnight Moon” together.

Indeed, for generations this book about a great green room with a telephone and red balloon has been a part of millions of bedtime rituals. But when “Goodnight Moon” was first published in 1947, the techniques employed by author Margaret Wise Brown were both innovative and radical. Rather than relying on traditional folk tales and fables to deliver a moral message, Ms. Brown wrote stories about the preoccupations of children, their curiosities and emotions and fears.

It was “revolutionary in its time," says Professor Cara Byrne.

But over the past 75 years, this "weirdly sweet book," as one father and grandfather puts it, has been an enduring source of warmth and connection for families.

When Kenny Varner attended the 60th birthday party of a family member recently, he was somewhat startled after the conversation turned to the enduring appeal of “Goodnight Moon.”  

He had mentioned how the much-beloved children’s bedtime story by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd would turn 75 in September. Dr. Varner, who directs the Gayle A. Zeiter Literacy Development Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had been thinking about the reasons “Goodnight Moon” is as popular today as it was decades ago.   

“We pulled it up on our phones, and we’re looking at a digital version of it together, and it’s just a text that is really robust,” says Dr. Varner, who focuses on literacy, language, and cultural identity. “And then family members and other folks, from the ages of 5 to over 90, all began to share memories of the importance of this book, both in their own childhoods and now and with who they are as parents. So there’s this interesting intergenerational thing happening with ‘Goodnight Moon,’” he says. 

Indeed, for generations this book about a great green room with a telephone and red balloon has been a part of millions of bedtime rituals, making Dr. Varner and others marvel at the aesthetic and developmental power that continues to make it a family favorite. 

The playful language excited the 5-year-old at Dr. Varner’s family gathering – the kittens, the mittens, the bowl full of mush! The person over 90 recalled, too, how the black-and-white prints interspersed in a book about a “great green room” were actually meant to keep costs down. Color prints could make a picture book prohibitively expensive back then.

“But that, actually, that’s one of the most memorable features of the book,” says Dr. Varner. It creates an aesthetic rhythm, melding perspectives of time, blinking back and forth between modern color and familiar black and white – even as time is grounded in subtle visual details, like the clocks, which move forward 10 minutes through the frames, and the moon, which rises bit by bit behind the window.  

“A small child is able to experience a comforting, structured routine without a deep, complex storyline,” Dr. Varner says.

But when “Goodnight Moon” was first published in 1947, such techniques were both innovative and radical, says Cara Byrne, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A scholar who focuses on the history of children’s storybooks, she begins all of her classes each semester with a discussion of the popular bedtime classic.

Monitor Backstory: A deeper reading of ‘Goodnight Moon’

“Goodnight Moon,” the Margaret Wise Brown classic read to children across generations, has its 75th anniversary on Sept. 3. The Monitor’s Harry Bruinius talks about a book that’s “modern and odd and elliptical” – one that was radical in its day, and that has since worked its way into so many bedtime rituals. Hosted by Samantha Laine Perfas.

“‘Goodnight Moon’ is actually a really great book to bring in first, because at its time it was doing something really radical,” says Dr. Byrne. “Her books were part of a movement of educators who were trying to push away from some other, older models of educating children – other norms or ideas about children as needing a particular type of instruction, needing to be moralized in a particular way.”

Indeed, in 1935, Ms. Brown studied to be a teacher at Bank Street College of Education, the alternative teacher training school in New York’s Greenwich Village. Its founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, believed children needed stories anchored in the familiar rather than the fantastic – and grounded in empirical research about the psychologies of children as they interacted with their worlds.

Ms. Brown never finished her studies or became a teacher, but as she began to write storybooks she moved away from the kinds of traditional folk tales and fables that conveyed simple moral messages. Instead, she wrote stories about the preoccupations of children, their curiosities and emotions and fears.  

She also sought out illustrators more in tune with modernist and avant-garde visual sensibilities. Mr. Hurd’s illustrations in “Goodnight Moon,” many have observed, are similar to Henri Matisse’s “L’Atelier Rouge.” The illustrations in “The Runaway Bunny” could have been inspired by Georges Seurat’s “The Circus.” 

“I think it’s one of those beautiful books that not only was revolutionary in its time; it was also kept out of some library collections because it was so different and odd,” says Dr. Byrne.

One of the book’s detractors was Anne Carroll Moore, the influential head of the children’s wing at the New York Public Library. A major historical figure and innovator in her own right, Miss Moore practically invented the idea of having a children’s wing in libraries. She introduced storytelling hours to NYPL’s vaunted main branch and instituted policies to allow even the poorest of immigrant children to check out books.

Persnickety and traditional, Miss Moore was also in many ways a powerful foil to Bank Street’s radical new ideas about childhood development and storytelling. A staunch proponent of magical, fantastic tales with plots upholding a moral order, she was enthusiastic about the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter while famously disliking E.B. White’s classic children’s stories “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web.” 

Similarly, the powerful New York librarian thought little of Ms. Brown’s storytelling, and because of her influence, “Goodnight Moon” was kept off shelves until 1972, the year of its 25th anniversary, when it was selling almost 100,000 copies a year. 

Mike Scott, a writer and communications specialist in Cleveland, has been reading “Goodnight Moon” and other books by Ms. Brown to his kids and grandkids for over 35 years. 

“For me, ‘Goodnight Moon’ is a weirdly sweet book, and I always enjoyed the poetic rhythm,” says Mr. Scott, who read the book to his adult children decades ago and is now again to his 3-year-old son, Ulysses, whose nickname is Ulee. 

“But it’s also a book with some very unexpected things in it. ‘What’s that mouse doing in the middle of the room? Who keeps a bowl of mush next to their bed? And what is mush, anyway?’” 

These are the questions he asks each generation of his family, and they respond to the book’s quirky hilarity as well as to the overall warmth of the book, he says. “It’s a fun book. Reading it is like going back into time, but sort of sideways and landing into an odd room, indeed.”

Ulee now loves the story – it’s one of his favorites, Mr. Scott says. They shared a special moment recently, too, when Ulee was excited to notice that the painting hanging on the left wall of the great green room – a black-and-white sketch – was actually a scene from “The Runaway Bunny,” another Margaret Wise Brown story they read together. 

“It was a pretty cool moment when we made that connection,” says Mr. Scott.

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‘A Concert of Parents Wrapped in Memories’: Readers on ‘Goodnight Moon’

An essay celebrating the story’s 75th anniversary prompted an outpouring from our readers.

• Share full article

By Elisabeth Egan

When The Times published my essay, “ The Enduring Wisdom of Goodnight Moon, ” last week, the reaction was swift. Readers had thoughts — and lots of them — about the beloved children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, which celebrated its 75th birthday this month.

Within hours, there were hundreds of comments on the piece. We heard from new parents, seasoned parents and grandparents. We heard from readers who knew the book by heart, and ones who were inspired to pick up a copy for the first time. We heard from fans in different time zones and on other continents, waxing poetic about their own experiences with “Goodnight Moon” or pointing out unexpected details. Laura Donnelly Smith of Silver Spring, M.D., wrote: “My only enduring issue with ‘Goodnight Moon’ was the bowl of mush NEXT TO the comb and brush. Every time, I cringed a little inside thinking of the potential for hair in the oatmeal.”

The majority of the 856 comments are honest and moving reflections from bookworms of all ages on their own dedication to this 131-word story of a small bunny getting ready to fall asleep. If you’re a regular in comment sections, you know how rare it is to enter one that’s overwhelmingly positive and supportive, honest and kind, with strangers trading memories, encouragement and solidarity. What a fitting celebration for a deceptively simple story that casts a long and comforting shadow. Here are a few of our favorite responses, edited for length and clarity.

Parents spoke of the book’s magic.

“All three of my sons said ‘hush’ as one of their first words.” — Miriam Lang-Budin, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.

“I’m a new mom and the biggest thing I didn’t realize about parenthood until I was IN IT, is that if you’re a working parent, you only get bedtime with them pretty much. She’s asleep when I’m off to work and I get home about 30 minutes before bed. Those nights of rocking her to sleep and gazing at her little face are sometimes the only baby moments I get in a day. I’m only four months in, but it feels like that college drop off is already so near. It really is enough to break your heart.” — Courtney Miller, Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Last year I pulled this book out to read to my newborn and she was immediately enamored with the high contrast colors. Her tiny face just lit up. Eventually we had to move to the board book edition which … now has some holes. She is turning 1 soon and today was her first day of day care. She was really keyed up and out of her mind after her first (partial) day. … At bedtime we pulled out ‘Goodnight Moon’ and she totally calmed down. … we put her in her crib and she stood up and watched us leave and then …. Laid down and went to sleep. Then I came out to the living room and read this lovely piece! — Anna Bevins, Los Angeles

“Now that our youngest is almost 4, I recently got rid of most of our baby books — but I couldn’t even imagine parting with this one. It’s been through five babies and its cover is long gone, and it’s held together by packing tape — but it’s perfection. I just have so many memories of my kids adoring it — I’m keeping it forever.” — Abby Cooper, Bergenfield, N.J.

Grandparents, too, shared generations of memories.

“I too wept often and full on over ‘Goodnight Moon.’ I read it to both my boys at bedtime over and over again. Now you’ve brought me to tears again in my 78th year. Both ‘boys’ are now men with children of their own. We’ve lived too far away to be part of our grandchildren’s daily lives and I fear they are now too old for ‘Goodnight Moon’ bedtime readings, but I suspect their parents did that ritual with them in the early years. The reason I am crying is knowing how fleeting is the time we have with our children. It seems so long when you’re in it, but so fast when it’s gone.” — Meta Nisbet, Pasa Robles, Calif.

“I stayed frequently with my grandchildren during the pandemic and tried to help while their parents worked at desks in other parts of the house. The youngest, not quite 2, carried ‘Goodnight Moon’ around like a security blanket. She would come to me if I was sitting, hand me the book, and pat my lap, an indication I was to lift her and read it, and I did. Again and again. Her favorite book, my favorite pandemic memory.” — Grandmother, California

For some, ‘Goodnight Moon’ was much more than a bedtime story.

“I love this book — I read this to my son when he was little, he just never got tired of it. I also use this book when tutoring for adult literacy programs. Recently, I tutored a women who never learned to read. She wanted to be able to read a book to her new great-grandson. We picked ‘Goodnight Moon” — it’s a great ‘gateway’ book, full of everyday household items; she now knows how to spell their names. And yes, she studied and was able to read it to her great grandbaby. Beautiful book.” — Katie Collins, Portland, Ore.

“I read this book with great delight to all four of my children. Yet, my most memorable encounter with ‘Goodnight, Moon,’ was at about 35,000 feet, years after my children were grown. It was a crowded flight and a young dad was trying to get his cranky toddler settled down to sleep. The little guy wasn’t having any of it and could be heard protesting in pretty much every corner of the plane. After trying a number of enticements, the dad pulled out ‘Goodnight, Moon’ and started to read it a bit loudly, probably hoping to get the boy’s attention.

Unexpectedly, a woman in the next row started reciting the words right along with the dad. Another joined her, then a few more, and pretty soon it seemed as if every one of us was paying homage to the comb and the brush and the bowl full of mush. It was a concert of parents wrapped in memories, sending love and good nights to the littlest one among us. The boy went totally silent and his mouth was a wide Oh! of wonder as he gazed transfixed at an entire plane full of adults lulling him to sleep with a story he obviously knew so well. As we came to the last words, he put a thumb in his mouth, shook off the day with a tiny shake, and settled down sweetly into his papa’s lap. It was at least a dozen years ago yet I still drop into the loveliest of places when I remember that night.” — Liz Casey, Mount Sinai, N.Y.

Even as adults, many readers find comfort in this book.

“This wonderfully beautiful article has brought me peace. Dying of colon cancer, I can now see the book as a road map for me. Goodnight moon, goodnight my cats, goodnight my children, goodnight my photographs, goodnight …” — Julie, Baltimore

“My son turns 30 next month; he’ll soon deploy overseas with the military. I read ‘Goodnight Moon’ to him most every night of his early life. This article, and remembering that book, finally allowed me to cry from the fear I have over what is coming, even while giving me hope. Thank you.” — John M. Flynn, Greensboro, N.C.

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The Surprising Ingenuity Behind “Goodnight Moon”

Author Margaret Wise Brown used new theories in childhood education to write the classic children’s book

Amy Crawford

Contributing Writer

The plot could not be simpler: A young bunny says goodnight to the objects and creatures in a green-walled bedroom, drifting gradually to sleep as the lights dim and the moon glows in a big picture window. Goodnight Moon has sold more than 48 million copies since it was published in 1947. It has been translated into at least a dozen languages, from Spanish to Hmong, and countless parents around the world have read it to their sleepy children.

Author Margaret Wise Brown, subject of a new biography, based Goodnight Moon on her own childhood ritual of saying goodnight to the toys and other objects in the nursery she shared with her sister Roberta, a memory that came back to her in a vivid dream as an adult. The text she jotted down upon waking is at once both cozy and unsettling, mimicking and inducing the unmoored feeling that comes with drifting away to sleep. Unlike so many children’s books, with their pat plots and clumsy didactics, it’s also one that parents can stand rereading—and not only for its soporific effect on their sons and daughters.

Reviewers have described the book as less a story than “an incantation,” and writers on the craft of writing have labored to tease out the strands of its genius. This exercise feels dangerous, since a close reading may raise more questions than answers (when was the bunny planning to eat that mush, anyway?). But while the book’s relationship to reality may be slightly askew, it also feels true to childhood, a period when, as Brown was quick to note, the world adults take for granted seems every bit as strange as a fairy story, and the pleasure of language lies less in what it communicates than in its sound and rhythm.

She may not be a household name like Beatrix Potter or Dr. Seuss, but with her innovative insights into what the very young really want to read about, Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) revolutionized children’s literature. The new book, In the Great Green Room , is by author Amy Gary, who bases her account of Brown’s “brilliant and bold life” partly on a trove of unpublished manuscripts, journals and notes that she discovered in Roberta’s hayloft in 1990. Over more than 25 years, as Gary pored over reams and reams of fragile onionskin that had been left untouched since Brown’s sudden death at age 42, the biography gradually took shape—and the woman who emerged was no less charming and strange than her most famous work.

In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown

The extraordinary life of the woman behind the beloved children’s classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny comes alive in this fascinating biography of Margaret Wise Brown.

Born into a wealthy family and raised on Long Island, Brown came to children’s literature in a roundabout way. In college, she admired Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, although she devoted more energy to the equestrian team than to academics. After breaking off an engagement with a well-bred beau (she overheard him laughing with her father over how to control her), she moved to Manhattan to pursue a vague literary ambition, living primarily on an allowance from her parents.

Brown loved the hustle and bustle of city life, but the short stories she wrote for adults failed to interest publishers. Feeling pressure from her father to either marry or start supporting herself, she eventually decided to enroll at the Bureau of Educational Experiments’ Cooperative School for Student Teachers—more usually known as Bank Street, for its Greenwich Village location. There, the school’s founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell recruited her to collaborate on a series of textbooks in a style Mitchell called “Here-and-Now.”

At the time, children’s literature still consisted largely of fairy tales and fables. Sprague, basing her ideas on the relatively new science of psychology and on observations of how children themselves told stories, believed that preschoolers were primarily interested in their own small worlds, and that fantasy actually confused and alienated them. “It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” Mitchell wrote. “The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness.”

Under Sprague’s mentorship, Brown wrote about the familiar—animals, vehicles, bedtime rituals, the sounds of city and country—testing her stories on classrooms of young children. It was important not to talk down to them, she realized, and yet still to speak to them in their own language. That would mean summoning her own keen, childlike senses to observe the world as a child does—which is how one chilly November she found herself spending the night in a friend’s barn, listening to the rumbling of cows’ bellies and the purring of farm cats.

Maintaining a childlike perspective was the key to her work, but throughout her life, Brown worried that she had failed to grow up—even as she approached 40, she was painting glow-in-the-dark stars over the bed in her New York apartment. But like the wandering protagonist of one of her other classics,  Home for a Bunny , she often felt out of place. “I am stuck in my childhood,” she told a friend, “and that raises the devil when one wants to move on.” The whimsical quality she interpreted as immaturity appealed to most of her friends, but it was a constant source of stress in her longest intimate relationship.

Brown met Michael Strange (born Blanche Oelrichs) at the home of a married man with whom they were each having an affair. Brown’s love life had always been complicated, and as she watched friends settle down with husbands and families, it was a fate she both yearned for and feared. But Strange, a poet who had been married to the actor John Barrymore, seemed to offer both the coziness of family life and the adventure Brown craved. Despite the era’s strong taboo around same-sex relationships, the women moved into apartments next door to one another and lived as a couple, on and off, through most of the 1940s.

Strange—alluring but also mercurial and narcissistic—was not an easy person to love. But even as she dismissed her partner’s “baby stories,” Brown was becoming a major force in the world of children’s publishing. Publishing dozens of titles a year under multiple names at seven publishers, she cultivated many of the best illustrators in the business and ensured that their work, an integral part of her books, was given its due at the printers. One of these was  Goodnight Moon , for which she recruited her close friend Clement Hurd to provide the color-saturated paintings that have since become iconic. When it went on sale for $1.75 in the fall of 1947, the  New York Times  praised the combination of art and language, urging parents that the book “should prove very effective in the case of a too wide-awake youngster.”

Although she gave some of her earliest stories away for a pittance, Brown became a tough negotiator, once going so far as to mail her editor a set of dueling pistols. And as she matured, her stories grew past the simple “Here-and-Now” she had learned under Sprague, becoming more dreamlike and evocative. “The first great wonder at the world is big in me,” she wrote to Strange. “That is the real reason that I write”

Though she was grief-stricken after Strange died of leukemia in 1950, it was then that Brown fully came into her own, reconciling her disappointment at never being able to write “serious” work for adults with her success in the growing children’s publishing field (the Baby Boom had made baby books big business). Her new self-confidence led to a (thoroughly veiled) autobiography in picture book form,  Mister Dog , about a pipe-smoking terrier who “belonged to himself” and “went wherever he wanted to go.”

“She was comfortable in her solitude,” Gary writes. “She belonged to herself and only herself.”

Soon after reconciling herself to life as a successful, independent woman, Brown met and fell in love with the man with whom she believed she would spend the rest of her life. James Stillman Rockefeller Jr., a handsome great-nephew of J.D. Rockefeller who was known to his friends as “Pebble,” asked her to marry him. For their honeymoon, the couple planned to sail around the world.

Before they could begin their grand adventure, Brown had to take a business trip to France, where she developed appendicitis. Her emergency surgery was successful, but the French doctor prescribed strict bed rest as she recovered. On the day scheduled for her release, a nurse asked how she felt. “Grand!” Brown declared, kicking up her feet—and dislodging a blood clot in her leg, which traveled to her brain and killed her within hours. She was 42.

Although he went on to find love and raise a family with another woman, Rockefeller never quite got over Brown. Gary, who relied on the now-elderly Pebble’s recollections for the last chapters of her biography, also persuaded him to write a moving prologue about their brief time together. “It has been sixty years since those days,” he writes, “but over half a century later, her light is burning ever brighter.”

It’s a sentiment with which any  Goodnight Moon  family is likely to agree.

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Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe .

Goodnight Moon By Margaret Wise Brown

Bedtime & dreams | classics, published: january 17, 2022, follow me on:.

Traditional Publisher

Author(s): margaret wise brown, illustrator(s): clement hurd, publisher: harper collins, publication date: september 03, 1947, book format: picture book, age range: 3-7, book length: 32 pages, isbn: 9780694003617, price: 8.99 usd | 10.99 cad, picture book review, goonight kittens, and goodnight mittens.

In the great, green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a picture of a cow jumping over the moon. What new parent hasn’t read those words. Many, many times! Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the most popular gifts for expectant parents, and with good reason. Gentle and soothing, this book is the perfect way to say goodnight to your day and help your little one drift off to dreamland. In my house, we always wrapped the book up by saying goodnight to everything in our own rooms. Although my own little ones are really too old for this one, the truth is, it still gets requested sometimes. Because it’s just that good.

About the Author(s):

Margaret wise brown (1910–1952), best known as the author of goodnight moon, wrote countless children’s books inspired by her belief that the very young were fascinated by the simple pleasures of the world around them. among her many bestselling golden books are home for a bunny, the golden egg book, mister dog, the color kittens, seven little postmen, and the sailor dog., about the illustrator(s):, clement hurd (1908–1988) graduated from yale university and studied painting in paris in the 1930s with fernand leger and others, where he developed his characteristic style using flat, vibrant colors. his work caught the eye of margaret wise brown, and their collaboration produced some of the most enduring children’s books of our time., buy my new books today.

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Friday 25 January 2019

Review: goodnight moon.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Book Review

Introduction: goodnight moon by margaret wise brown.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd is surprisingly found on the Mad Men Reading List. What makes it surprising, is that it is a children’s book for the under five-year old category. I want to also add that the book is found on many of the must-read children’s book lists. I was curious why Goodnight Moon would be on the Mad Men Reading List so I bought a copy to read.

Have you read?

25 Books: Mad Men Reading List Watership Down Summary: 10 Leadership Lessons

What is Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown About?

The first thing that struck me is that there aren’t any real humans in the story, but rabbits assume the role of people. I decided to conduct some quick research on the significance of rabbits and found out that in China, the rabbit is one of the astrological animals, and is linked to good fortune and the moon. Additionally, the rabbit is also linked to abundance, comfort and vulnerability. In my opinion, children are vulnerable and need adults to protect them.

In the book, Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Clement Hurd’s illustrations play an important part in the unfolding of the story. When the story starts, there is a large bedroom, a child (young rabbit) laying in bed. There are two photographs, the cow jumping over the moon, and the three little bears sitting in chairs. The room is painted green; there is a red balloon; a telephone, clock and a copy of Goodnight Moon on one night table, and on the other is a lamp, bowl with porridge, a comb and a brush; a lit fireplace with logs in a basket, and a clock on the mantel.

In the book, it sounds like the child is saying his bedtime prayers, and he starts to name everything he can see, then tells the room goodnight. The young rabbit tells the moon goodnight, then he starts to tell everything in the room goodnight, then he moves outside to tell the stars and the air goodnight, then he closes off his prayer with goodnight noises everywhere. As I read Goodnight Moon, it feels right, like it truly represents the voices of children. It is the perfect story for a parent to share with a child because there is also a subtle message that there is a world out there that we should care about, and that’s an important lesson for a child to learn at a young age.

The illustrations create the perfect atmosphere for going to sleep, and going through the naming of things makes you sleepy. Choosing a rabbit to act as a human lends itself to human-animal questions: Are humans more important than animals or are they equally important? While reading the story, there is a deep sense of comfort and security.

Final Thoughts: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Because I have never watched an episode of Mad Men, I am having a very hard time finding a context for why Goodnight Moon is among the 25 books on the Mad Men Reading List and reading the book hasn’t made me any wiser. If any of you can provide the context, please let me know.

About the Author  Avil Beckford

Hello there! I am Avil Beckford, the founder of The Invisible Mentor. I am also a published author, writer, expert interviewer host of The One Problem Podcast and MoreReads Success Blueprint, a movement to help participants learn in-demand skills for future jobs. Sign-up for MoreReads: Blueprint to Change the World today! In the meantime, Please support me by buying my e-books Visit My Shop , and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter and Pinterest !

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Goodnight Moon Kindle Edition

In this classic of children's literature, beloved by generations of readers and listeners, the quiet poetry of the words and the gentle, lulling illustrations combine to make a perfect book for the end of the day.

In a great green room, tucked away in bed, is a little bunny. "Goodnight room, goodnight moon." And to all the familiar things in the softly lit room—to the picture of the three little bears sitting on chairs, to the clocks and his socks, to the mittens and the kittens, to everything one by one—the little bunny says goodnight.

One of the most beloved books of all time, Goodnight Moon is a must for every bookshelf and a time-honored gift for baby showers and other special events.

• Print length 32 pages
• Language English
• Grade level Preschool and up
• Lexile measure AD360L
• Publisher HarperCollins
• Publication date November 8, 2016
• Page Flip Not Enabled
• Word Wise Not Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Not Enabled
• Sticky notes Not Enabled
• ISBN-13 978-0064430173
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

Finding all of the items mentioned throughout the book within the pictures is a good bedtime activity--a reappearing little mouse is particularly pesky. By the end of the little rabbit's goodnight poem, the story has quieted to a whisper, and the drawings have darkened with nightfall. As you turn the last page, you can expect a sleepy smile and at least a yawn or two. (Picture book)

From Publishers Weekly

“A little rabbit bids goodnight to each familiar thing in his moonlit room. Rhythmic, gently lulling words combined with warm and equally lulling pictures make this beloved classic an ideal bedtime book.” — Christian Science Monitor

"Little children will love this going to sleep book—a really fresh idea by a talented and prolific author, illustrated by Clement Hurd. In a soft sing-song, here is a bunny saying goodnight room, goodnight moon, goodnight to all the familiar objects in the softly lighted room. Then—as the room darkens, in successive pictures, the goodnight ceremony moves forward." — Kirkus Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Millions of children have been lulled to sleep by this classic bedtime tale. Now paired with a cuddly plush bunny, it is the perfect way to say goodnight.

From the Back Cover

In a great green room, tucked away in bed, is a little bunny. "Goodnight room, goodnight moon." And to all the familiar things in the softly lit room--to the picture of the three little bears sitting in chairs, to the clocks and his socks, to the mittens and the kittens, to everything one by one--he says goodnight.

In this classic of modern children's literature, beloved by generations of readers and listeners, the quiet poetry of the words and the gentle, lulling illustrations combine to make a perfect book for the end of the day.

About the Author

Margaret Wise Brown, cherished for her unique ability to convey a child’s experience and perspective of the world, transformed the landscape of children’s literature with such beloved classics as Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny . Other perennial favorites by Ms. Brown include My World ; Christmas in the Barn ; The Dead Bird ; North, South, East, West ; and Good Day, Good Night .

Clement Hurd (1908–1988) is best known for illustrating Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny , the classic picture books by Margaret Wise Brown. He studied painting in Paris with Fernand Léger and others in the early 1930s. After his return to the United States in 1935, he began to work in children's books. He illustrated more than one hundred books, many of them with his wife, Edith Thacher Hurd, including the Johnny Lion books, The Day the Sun Danced , and The Merry Chase . A native of New York City, he lived most of his life in Vermont and California.

Clement Hurd (1908–1988) se graduó de Yale University. Estudió pintura en París en los años 1930 con Fernand Léger, entre otros. Allí fue donde desarrolló su estilo característico, compuesto de colores de fuerte contraste. Hurd estuvo casado con la escritora Edith Thacher Hurd, con quien también creó muchos libros que se convirtieron en favoritos de los niños.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01MPZ8KKF
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins; 50th Anniversary ed. edition (November 8, 2016)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 8, 2016
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3767 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 32 pages
• #1 in Children's Classic Literature
• #1 in Baby & Toddler Word eBooks
• #2 in Baby & Toddler Bedtime & Dreaming Books

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About the author

Margaret wise brown.

Margaret Wise Brown wrote hundreds of books and stories during her life, but she is best known for Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny. Even though she died over 45 years ago, her books still sell very well. Margaret loved animals. Most of her books have animals as characters in the story. She liked to write books that had a rhythm to them. Sometimes she would put a hard word into the story or poem. She thought this made children think harder when they are reading. She wrote all the time. There are many scraps of paper where she quickly wrote down a story idea or a poem. She said she dreamed stories and then had to write them down in the morning before she forgot them. She tried to write the way children wanted to hear a story, which often isn't the same way an adult would tell a story. She also taught illustrators to draw the way a child saw things. One time she gave two puppies to someone who was going to draw a book with that kind of dog. The illustrator painted many pictures one day and then fell asleep. When he woke up, the papers he painted on were bare. The puppies had licked all the paint off the paper. Margaret died after surgery for a bursting appendix while in France. She had many friends who still miss her. They say she was a creative genius who made a room come to life with her excitement. Margaret saw herself as something else - a writer of songs and nonsense.

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10 Things You Might Not Know About Goodnight Moon and Its Creator

Photo: Philippe Halsman. Smithsonian Institute

Goodnight Moon , the classic bedtime book by Margaret Wise Brown with pictures by Clement Hurd, turns seventy-five this year. In just 130 words (twenty of them "goodnight"), Brown's simple and rhythmic verse—wishing goodnight to the objects in a young bunny's room—casts a soothing spell over the listener. In contrast to the pared-down text, Hurd's vibrant pictures invite the viewer (especially parents who have read the book aloud umpteen times) to explore all the elements of the room noticing the time on the clock changing, the room slightly darkening, the mouse moving about in a most Goldbuggian way.

In bedrooms around the world, Goodnight Moon's celebration of a nighttime ritual has become its own ritual—timeless, comforting, and beloved. You may know every word and image of this book by heart, but here are some fun facts and background about the book and its creator.

1. Margaret Wise Brown Wrote Over 100 Books for Children

Brown was an inaugural member of the Bank Street Writers Lab  in downtown Manhattan established by Lucy Sprague Mitchell in 1937 which encouraged the creation of books for children aligned with their growth and development. Brown was incredibly prolific and wrote over one hundred children's books (some published posthumously) over the course of fourteen years. Between 1946 and 1948, for example, she wrote fifteen books in addition to Goodnight Moon . She collaborated with some of the most era-defining illustrators of the day including Clement Hurd, Garth Williams, Leonard Weisgard, Dahlov Ipar, H.A. Rey, Richard Scarry, Esphyr Slobodkina, Crockett Johnson, and Alice and Martin Provensen.

2. Brown Also Published Under Pen Names

In her personal life, her friends and family gave her many nicknames including "Brownie," "Tim," "Goldie," and "the Bun," and, professionally, Brown published under pen names including Golden MacDonald, Timothy Hay, and Juniper Sage (a joint nom de plume with Edith Hurd, a friend from Bank Street and the wife of illustrator Clement Hurd). According to Clement Hurd, in an early handwritten version of Goodnight Moon , Brown had listed the authors as "Memory Ambrose" (the name of a friend's housekeeper) and the illustrator as "Hurricane Jones". 

3. Goodnight Moon did not sell well during Brown’s lifetime

Despite positive reviews, Goodnight Moon was only a modest commercial success during Brown's lifetime. It certainly didn't help that the book lacked The New York Public Library's stamp of approval and was missing from our shelves for its first twenty-five years (see below). But, fueled by word of mouth and the growth of bookstores, Goodnight Moon  has endured to become a bedtime classic, translated for children all over the world, and is one of the best-selling children's books of all time. It has never been out of print. 

4. Yes, it took 25 years before Goodnight Moon was on NYPL's shelves

Although she was officially retired at the time, influential children's librarian and head of The New York Public Library's children's services,  Anne Carroll Moore , famously disliked Goodnight Moon  (dismissing it as overly sentimental). Her opinion carried such weight with former colleagues that the book wasn't put on shelves until 1972—a quarter century after it was first published. The delay kept it off the Library's Top 10 Checkouts of All Time  (but check back in a few years!), but it was included in The New York Public Library's Books of the Century .

5. Goodnight Moon is filled with visual treats

In addition to keeping your eye on the clock, the moon, the shadows, and that little mouse, there are some other surprises and meta moments in the images:

• There are three pictures hanging in the bunny's bedroom including one of a cow jumping over the moon and one of three bears. The bears are sitting in a room—in their room hangs the same picture of a cow jumping over the moon.
• The third picture? It's a scene from T he Runaway Bunny , an earlier collaboration of Brown and Hurd published in 1942.
• On the bunny's bookcase is a book. Which book? Also  The Runaway Bunny.
• On the bunny's bedside table is a book. Which book? Goodnight Moon , of course
• Near the end of the book, there is a bit less mush in the bowl on the table—presumably eaten by the mouse creeping about.
• Although surely only recognizable to a few friends, the arched fireplace in the bunny's room may have been based on the one in Brown's writing studio at Cobble Court (see #8).

6. There are also a few things missing from the pictures

Leonard Marcus who wrote a biography of Brown, notes that she asked Clement Hurd to make a few adjustments to the pictures to not raise the hackles of tight-laced librarians and parents—removing the mouse from the bunny's bed (good call) and removing the cow's udder from the "cow jumping over the moon" picture on the wall. Years later, Hurd's photo on the dust jacket was digitally altered by HarperCollins to remove a cigarette from his hand so as not to appear to promote smoking.

7. Brown was also an editor

Brown met William R. Scott and his wife Ethel McCullough through Bank Street and became the first editor of their publishing company Willam R. Scott, Inc. At Brown's behest, Scott and McCullough reached out to famous authors including Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck to interest them in writing for children, but the only one who responded was Gertrude Stein who worked with Brown on  The World is Round published in 1939 (illustrated by Clement Hurd).  

As an editor she was able to promote the careers of like-minded authors and illustrators including giving Clement Hurd his first illustrator job ( Bumble Bugs and Elephants,  1938), editing Edith Thacher Hurd's first book ( Hurry Hurry , 1938), and, after running out of illustrator jobs for her, encouraging Esphyr Slobodkina to take up a pen...resulting in the classic children's book Caps for Sale .

8. You can still see her writing studio, Cobble Court, in the West Village

Place was extremely important to Margaret Wise Brown. For parts of the late 1940s and early 50s she rented an 1800s farmhouse, dubbed Cobble Court, at 71st Street and York Avenue where she would escape away to work. In fact, it is likely that she wrote Goodnight Moon there. Tucked away from the street and only accessible through a passageway, the house was the inspiration for The Hidden House .  It was also depicted by illustrator Garth Williams in her book Mister Dog.  Facing demolition, in 1967 the house was moved to  121 Charles Street  in the West Village where it remains today.

Friends and frequent collaborators Clement and Edith Hurd were guests at Cobble Court in 1945. Clement described their arrival in a 1983 remembrance in  Horn Book Magazine .

"To get to the backyard, we had to go through a passageway in the building on the street. The passage was cobbled, and at the end of it there was an old two-story clapboard house. I will never forget that first view as we stepped out into the courtyard and saw the little house with its welcoming lights shining softly from every window onto a dusting of new snow. When we went in, we found fires burning in both fireplaces, vases of fresh flowers in every room, fur rugs on the floor, lots of fur pillows, and a general sense of warm coziness reminiscent of the house in which the little fur family lived in Margaret's book illustrated by Garth Williams...We basked in the spiritual warmth of it all for a couple of weeks and then moved to the country when we suspected that Brownie might want her house back."

9. Brown lived and thought outside the beaten path

Goodnight Moon may now seem like such a simple book, but it was once considered unconventional, as was Brown's entire philosophy of writing for children (along with others at the Writers Lab). Instead of fables and fairy tales, Brown focused on the familiar, everyday sights and sounds in a child's life. From the "puff, puff, puff and chug, chug, chug" of a train and a mother's "hush" to wishing objects goodnight and noting what is "important" about things, she blazed a trail for a new type of writing for children.

"The important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it. It's like a little shovel, You hold it in your hand, You can put it in your mouth, It isn't flat, It's hollow, And it spoons things up. But the important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it." (The Important Book, 1949)

In her own life, Brown didn't follow a conventional path for a woman. She never married or had children (although she had many relationships including with a woman, Michael Strange, née Blanche Oelrichs, whose papers are at NYPL ). She drove a convertible, wore fur coats, bought a house without electricity or plumbing on an island of Maine, and generally lived a spirited, independent life on her own terms.

10. Goodnight Moon has entered the zeitgeist

Goodnight Moon , whose words and pictures are so well known, has been parodied multiple times in books including Goodnight iPad   (2011) and Good Morning Zoom (2020). It has been adapted into a stage musical by composer and lyricist Chad Henry and is performed around the country. It's also been featured to comedic effect in The Simpsons , Maya and Marty , and Saturday Night Live . In 2021 the book was the subject of an immersive art exhibition by Fort Makers. And an Ohio bookstore owner was such a fan that she had the "great green room" recreated in her shop .

Related Books

Brown is the subject of two biographies.

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by Amy Gary

Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (1992)

by Leonard Marcus

There have been two picture book biographies about her—perfect for sharing with your young friends or children.

The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown

by Mac Barnett; illustrated by Sarah Jacoby

What is important about Margaret Wise Brown? In forty-two inspired pages, this biography artfully plays with form and language to vividly bring to life one of the greatest children’s book creators who ever lived.

Only Margaret: A Story About Margaret Wise Brown

by Candice Ransom; illustrated by Nan Lawson

This whimsically illustrated biography shares how an independent, fun-loving woman became a trailblazing pioneer of the picture-book form.

Brown also features prominently in two works of fiction!

The Upstairs House (2021)

by Julia Fine

Recovering from a difficult childbirth, a woman caring for her newborn alone while her husband travels for work suffers a psychological unraveling that causes her to see the ghost of famed children's book author Margaret Wise Brown.

Goodnight June (2014)

by Sarah Jio

June Andersen is professionally successful, but her personal life is marred by unhappiness. Unexpectedly, she is called to settle her great-aunt Ruby's estate and determine the fate of Bluebird Books, the children's bookstore Ruby founded in the 1940s. Amidst the store's papers, June stumbles upon letters between her great-aunt and the late Margaret Wise Brown-and steps into the pages of American literature.

Picture Books by Margaret Wise Brown

Many of Brown's books are in our collection and available for borrowing. In many cases, they have been reissued with new illustrations. Here are just a few:

Two Little Trains

illustrated by Greg Pizzoli

Two little trains, one streamlined, the other old-fashioned, puff, puff, puff, and chug, chug, chug, on their way West.

The Little Island

illustrated by Leonard Weisgard

Depicts the changes that occur on a small island as the seasons come and go, as day changes to night, and as a storm approaches.

The Dead Bird

illustrated by Christian Robinson

When they find a dead bird, a group of children bury it in the woods, sing a song to it, and put flowers on the grave.

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Six fun facts about beatrix potter, sheep farmer, behind the pages: memoirs and biographies of famous children's book authors.

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Goodnight moon.

• Parents say (11)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 3 kid reviews

Goodnight, Moon is a perfect book for toddlers at bedtime

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A great book for todlers.