The new book, In the Great Green Room, is by author Amy Gary, who bases her account of Brown’s “brilliant and bold life” partly on a trove of unpublished manuscripts, journals and notes that she discovered in Roberta’s hayloft in 1990. Seuss, but with her innovative insights into what the very young really want to read about, Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) revolutionized children’s literature. She may not be a household name like Beatrix Potter or Dr. But while the book’s relationship to reality may be slightly askew, it also feels true to childhood, a period when, as Brown was quick to note, the world adults take for granted seems every bit as strange as a fairy story, and the pleasure of language lies less in what it communicates than in its sound and rhythm. This exercise feels dangerous, since a close reading may raise more questions than answers (when was the bunny planning to eat that mush, anyway?).

Reviewers have described the book as less a story than “an incantation,” and writers on the craft of writing have labored to tease out the strands of its genius. Unlike so many children’s books, with their pat plots and clumsy didactics, it’s also one that parents can stand rereading-and not only for its soporific effect on their sons and daughters. The text she jotted down upon waking is at once both cozy and unsettling, mimicking and inducing the unmoored feeling that comes with drifting away to sleep. It has been translated into at least a dozen languages, from Spanish to Hmong, and countless parents around the world have read it to their sleepy children.Īuthor Margaret Wise Brown, subject of a new biography, based Goodnight Moon on her own childhood ritual of saying goodnight to the toys and other objects in the nursery she shared with her sister Roberta, a memory that came back to her in a vivid dream as an adult. Goodnight Moon has sold more than 48 million copies since it was published in 1947.

The plot could not be simpler: A young bunny says goodnight to the objects and creatures in a green-walled bedroom, drifting gradually to sleep as the lights dim and the moon glows in a big picture window.

Goodnight moon by margaret brown