| Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and art.  Photograph by Consuelo Kanaga, “Margaret Wise Brown” / Courtesy Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam / Estate of Consuelo Kanaga “Goodnight Moon” has sold more than forty million copies and, with its beguiling illustrations and sonorous bedtime cadences, has become a kind of wallpaper of American childhood. But, as Anna Holmes writes, the book “is full of tantalizing ambiguities” and contains surprising ideological and linguistic depths. The life of its author, who published dozens of books before her death, at the age of forty-two, was similarly rich and complicated: -
Brown “was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman,” Holmes writes. “She burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles.” -
Brown once told Life, “I don’t especially like children”—yet she was deeply attuned to the open way that children encounter the world. She would frequently audition her stories in progress to audiences of kids. As Holmes writes, “She later declared that children were the true authors of many of her books: she was ‘merely an ear and a pen.’ ” -
Her work was influenced by modernism, and she would often pepper her straightforward sentences with non sequiturs or surprisingly difficult words. She said that children want “a few gorgeous big grownup words to bite on.” This fascinating exploration of Margaret Wise Brown will give you a new way of reading her beloved books—and open your eyes to all that you can learn from watching a child experience them. —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor | 
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