Margaret Wise Brown

Brown was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, the middle child of three of Maude Margaret (Johnson) and Robert Bruce Brown.[1][3] She was the granddaughter of politician Benjamin Gratz Brown. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. She was initially raised in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923,[4][5] while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut. In 1925, she attended The Kew-Forest School.[6] She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

Brown was an avid, lifelong beagler and was noted for her ability to keep pace, on foot, with the hounds.[7]

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English[1] from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher and also studied art. While working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City she started writing books for children. Bank Street promoted a new approach to children's education and literature, emphasizing the real world and the "here and now".[8] This philosophy influenced Brown's work; she was also inspired by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose literary style influenced Brown's own writing.[8]

Brown's first published children's book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers. Impressed by Brown's "here and now" style, W. R. Scott hired her as his first editor in 1938.[9] Through Scott, she published the Noisy Book series among others. As editor at Scott, one of Brown's first projects was to recruit contemporary authors to write children's books for the company. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Brown's hero Gertrude Stein accepted the offer.[8] Stein's book The World is Round was illustrated by Clement Hurd,[10] who had previously teamed with Brown on W. R. Scott's Bumble Bugs and Elephants, considered "perhaps the first modern board book for babies".[11] Brown and Hurd later teamed on the children's book classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, published by Harper. In addition to publishing a number of Brown's books, under her editorship W. R. Scott published Edith Thacher Hurd's first book, Hurry Hurry, and Esphyr Slobodkina's classic Caps for Sale.

The New York Public Library initially banned Good Night Moon due to the influence of retired librarian Anne Carrol Moore, who reportedly "hated" the book. It wasn't until 1972 that the book was finally made available to patrons.[12]

From 1944 to 1946, Doubleday published three picture books written by Brown under the pseudonym "Golden MacDonald" (coopted from her friend's handyman)[7] and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. Weisgard was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1946, and he won the 1947 Medal for Little Lost Lamb and The Little Island. Two more of their collaborations appeared in 1953 and 1956, after Brown's death. The Little Fisherman, illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar, was published in 1945. The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Early in the 1950s she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series, including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog, and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.

While at Hollins she was briefly engaged.[13] She dated, for some time, an unknown "good, quiet man from Virginia,"[14] had a long-running affair with William Gaston,[15][16] and had a summer romance with Preston Schoyer.[17] In the summer of 1940, Brown began a long-term relationship with Blanche Oelrichs (pen name Michael Strange), poet/playwright, actress, and the former wife of John Barrymore. The relationship, which began as a mentoring one, eventually became romantic and included co-habiting at 10 Gracie Square in New York beginning in 1943.[18] As a studio, they used Cobble Court, a wooden house later moved to Charles Street. Oelrichs, who was almost 20 years Brown's senior, died in 1950.

Brown went by various nicknames in different circles of friends. To her Dana Hall and Hollins friends she was "Tim," as her hair was the color of timothy hay.[19] To Bank Street friends she was "Brownie."[20] To William Gaston she was "Goldie," in keeping with the use of Golden MacDonald as the author of The Little Island.[16]

In 1952, Brown met James Stillman 'Pebble' Rockefeller Jr. at a party, and they became engaged. Later that year, while on a book tour in Nice, France, she died at 42 of an embolism, shortly after surgery for a ruptured appendix. Kicking up her leg to show her nurses how well she was feeling caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge and travel to her heart.[21]

A 1992 profile in the New Yorker "The Radical Woman Behind 'Goodnight Moon,'" featured a trip through Brown's "Only House" island cottage in Vinalhaven, Maine, which still retains elements of her picture books. The profile includes an interview with Rockefeller, noting that he was one of the few living people who'd known Brown well. They had planned to marry in Panama and honeymoon aboard his boat, the Mandalay, but she did not recover.[22]

"She was so full in her own life," Rockefeller told the interviewer. "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."[22]

In 2022, Rockefeller penned a memoir called Wayfarer, about his own long life of adventure, including his memories of Brown.[23]

By the time of Brown's death, she had authored well over one hundred books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House," in Vinalhaven, Maine.[21]

Brown bequeathed the royalties to many of her books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny to Albert Clarke, the son of a neighbor who was nine years old when she died. In 2000, reporter Joshua Prager detailed in The Wall Street Journal the troubled life of Clarke, who has squandered the millions of dollars the books have earned him and who believes that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss.[24]

Brown left behind over 70 unpublished manuscripts. After unsuccessfully trying to sell them, her sister Roberta Brown Rauch kept them in a cedar trunk for decades. In 1991, a future biographer, Amy Gary of WaterMark Inc., rediscovered the paper-clipped bundles, more than 500 typewritten pages in all, and set about getting the stories published.[25]

Many of Brown's books have been re-issued with new illustrations decades after their original publication. Many more of her books are still in print with the original illustrations. Her books have been translated into several languages. Full-length biographies on Brown have been written by Leonard S. Marcus (Harper Paperbacks, 1999), and by Amy Gary (Flatiron Books, 2017).[26] There are also several biographies for children, including by Carol Greene (Rookie Biographies, 1994), Jill C. Wheeler (Checkerboard Books, 2006), Mac Barnett (HarperCollins, 2019), and Candice Ransom (William B Eerdmans, 2021). Claudia H. Pearson published a Freudian analysis of Brown's "classic series" of bunny books, entitled Have a Carrot (Look Again Press, 2010).[27]

Big Red Barn (reissue), illustrated by Felicia Bond

During her lifetime, Brown essentially had four publishers: Harper & Brothers, W. R. Scott, Doubleday, and Little Golden Books. The books written for Doubleday were published under the pseudonym "Golden MacDonald". All were unpaged picture books illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. Two appeared after her death.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Margaret Wise Brown.

• Margaret Wise Brown at Library of Congress, with 283 library catalog records
• Timothy Hay, Golden MacDonald, and Juniper Sage at Library of Congress Authorities, with catalog records
• Margaret Wise Brown Archive – fan website with bibliography of Adapted Stories, Articles & Essays, Anthologies, Biographies, Collections, Ghost Written, Periodicals, and Picture Books, all with cover images