Margaret Wise Brown Papers

Margaret Wise Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 23, 1910, to Robert Bruce and Maude (Johnson) Brown. She was educated at private schools in Switzerland and Massachusetts before receiving a B.A. degree in English from Hollins College in 1932. Brown studied at the Bureau of Educational Experiments, a combined nursery and progressive research institute for child behavior, in New York City. Although she quickly understood the development of perception in young children, she felt herself unsuited to be a teacher and began writing children's books. She served as editor of children's books for the William R. Scott Inc. publishing company between 1938 and 1942, promoting a genre of early childhood literature rooted in children's everyday experiences.

Brown is celebrated for the revolutionary quality of her picture books. She acknowledged children's natural interests in novel sights, sounds, and smells, as well as their concern with being lost, alone, found, and protected. Brown produced books at an extraordinary rate between 1938 and 1952. She authored more than a hundred books, among them classics like The Noisy Book (1939), Runaway Bunny (1942), and Goodnight Moon (1947). Brown received the Caldecott Medal in 1947 for The Little Island. She traveled to France in 1952, but became ill suddenly and died at Nice on November 13.

Sources:

Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, ed. Laurie Collier and Joyce Nakamura (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), 1:345-349.

Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, ed. Laura Standley Berger, 4th ed. (Detroit: St. James Press, 1995), 154-156.

Children's Books and Their Creators, ed. Anita Silvey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 95-97.