The complicated woman behind ‘Goodnight Moon’
“In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon / And a picture of — ”
Few parents are unable to finish the first line from the 1947 children’s classic Goodnight
Moon, which has sold 27 million copies. With illustrations by Clement Hurd, the picture book was written by the prolific Margaret Wise Brown, whose life and work are explored in Amy Gary’s new biography, titled (of course),
In the Great Green Room (Flatiron, 279 pp., eeeE out of four). Although Goodnight Moon’s lulling style is familiar in today’s many go-to-sleep books for children, at the time it was unusual, so much so that for more than 20 years the New York Public Library declined to include the book in its stacks — just one of many anecdotes Gary includes about the beloved story’s history.
Calm though her works may be (they include The Runaway Bun
ny, The Little Island and dozens more), Margaret Wise Brown’s life was anything but.
Born into a wealthy but chilly New York family, Brown spent her early years roaming estate grounds on Long Island and at boarding school in Wellesley. In college she discovered a love for horse riding, poetry and the hunting event known as “beagling.” A first job at noted progressive school Bank Street let Brown create stories for children that merged her naturalist eye with her love for Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde style. Yet often her writing took a back seat to an impressive love drama in her personal life: casting off a wealthy fiancé, falling for an older family man in Maine, and — most significant — devoting herself to one woman who would shape her artistic and erotic path for the rest of her life. Brown’s decade-long relationship with poet and theater artist Michael Strange (originally Blanche Oelrichs) nearly merits its own book, as the women challenge 1940s conventions with gusto: dressing androgynously, cultivating lives of art and, of course, being in love.
Unfortunately, it was a lopsided love, with Brown’s needs never quite fulfilled by the older Strange — a “vainglorious semicelebrity” — whose cruelty to Brown dismayed many of her friends. After nursing Strange through her final weeks of leukemia, Brown was bereft.
Despite her phenomenal success with multiple children’s books, as well as songs, poems and essays, Margaret Wise Brown never stopped trying — and failing — to write for adults. This painful disappointment needs more exploration, as we don’t learn much about these works or their problems. Gary also shortchanges the life-long effects of Brown’s troubled connection to her family, especially problematic since it was the discovery of a trove of works kept by Brown’s sister that prompted this biography.
Though her life was cut short by illness (she died in 1952 at age 42), Margaret Wise Brown’s story reads as a stirring evocation of a woman who insisted on freedom in her art and in her love life.