7/4/2023 0 Comments Goodnight moon book![]() ![]() When Brown was emerging as a writer, in the nineteen-thirties, most books for young children drew on classic fables and folktales, providing moral instruction on each page. Many readers now think of Brown titles like “ The Runaway Bunny” as tranquil introductions to storytelling, but they were radical for their time. At the age of forty-two, she died suddenly, in the South of France, after a clot cut off the blood supply to her brain. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a fetish for fur, and hunted rabbits on weekends. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. ![]() Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “ Wild Things,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”-just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “ Goodnight Moon,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules. ![]()
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