"Part of what made her work special was the emotional truthfulness of it," said Marcus. 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. "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. 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. The Sunday Magazine 6:21 How the unconventional Goodnight Moon became a children's classic It was their worldview and desires that influenced the stories she told. There, Marcus said she wrote stories for students in the nursery school, gathering feedback from the children themselves.
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.īank Street taught progressive approaches to educating children and favoured the idea that books had a place in the very beginning of children's lives. She struggled, however, to write for adults, the biographer said. "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 needsīrown was a poet by "temperament," according to Marcus, and had ambitions to write for the New Yorker. "I think deep down 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.
"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."ĭespite 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.
"It does feel like a kind of incantation," said Lissa Paul, director of the PhD program in interdisciplinary humanities at Brock University. Margaret Wise Brown is the author of Goodnight Moon and many other children's books, including The Runaway Bunny.
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