So many of us, I am sure, have “Goodnight Moon” on our bookshelves. When they were little, my children would select three books each night, and “Goodnight Moon” was a popular choice. Amy Gary’s biography of Margaret Wise Brown illuminates the life of the beloved children’s author, whom I used to picture her as a little old lady with glasses and a knitted shawl, sipping tea at her desk while cats lay sleeping before a warm fireplace. I was surprised to learn that she was more Carrie Bradshaw than Jane Austen. Gary presents a Brown as a young, sassy, flirty creative whose work includes hundreds of poems that were never published. She also wrote children’s books for Disney and Little Golden Books. She had an innate sense of what children would like, observed children’s reactions to stories read aloud, and spent hours in the woods of Maine observing flora and fauna. She had a desire to be taken seriously as a writer, and even though children’s literature was up and coming during her lifetime, 48 million copies later and still selling, “Goodnight Moon” has proven it is here to stay.
