Why are we not hearing from this thrilling creature, celebrated for her ear, renowned for her sound? (Leonard S. Here is a woman who left behind diaries, letters and papers of all kinds. They’re also packed with descriptions of décor and menus - the plastic-foam peanuts authors sometimes toss into a story to give it volume, without realizing that they’re adding no weight.įar more baffling - criminal, actually - is that Brown’s voice is absent, entirely, from “In the Great Green Room” until the final page. (“Margaret and Gratz had seen little of each other over the past few years, and they enjoyed the time together.”) Her early pages are teeming with dead-end digressions. But Gary only manages to render her in shades of taupe. (Really, why not say goodnight to your comb and your brush and a bowl full of mush?)īrown may have led a vibrant, colorful life. “Goodnight Moon” is by far the most famous of Brown’s hundred or so picture books, and for good reason: It replicates the lulling, la-di-da cadences that toddlers use when they jabber to themselves, and it captures the strange tendency of young children to assign emotional lives to ordinary household objects. It dislodged a blood clot in her leg, which swiftly traveled to her brain.
“Grand!” she replied, giving a cancan kick. She was partial to furs she preferred writing with quill pens in her Greenwich Village apartment, she held festive parties for the Birdbrain Club, her friends’ answer to the Algonquin Round Table.īrown even died in a gesture of high-spirited defiance: After receiving an emergency appendectomy in France, she was asked by a nurse how she was doing.
One of her favorite pastimes was beagling, a sport that requires chasing hares on foot.
She had stormy relationships with both men and women. She was gorgeous, vivacious and luminous, a firefly in Hepburn slacks. In real life, Brown was anything but forgettable. Mention her name and you’ll get lots of blank stares mention her best-known work, “ Goodnight Moon,” and suddenly the tumblers snap into place: Oh right, her. There’s no way to document this, obviously, but it seems safe to venture that millions of people in the world have read Margaret Wise Brown’s books without realizing they’ve done so.
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