goodnight nobody

May 31, 2017 1:22 PM

Author Amy Gary delved into Margaret Wise Brown's collected papers to write a new biography of the woman behind some much-loved children's books, including Goodnight Moon.

Margaret Wise Brown and the Mystery of Mood

It was interesting at the outset to think about the vast mood influence the magic of one of Brown’s books had cast into the nighttime wells of millions of children over a period of several decades and still to this day. Then, to pause to consider how little any reader, be they parent or child, knew about the particular geometry of her life, to say nothing of the scores of books she wrote that haven’t yet enjoyed the same ascendency as Goodnight Moon including her Noisy Book series, or those she wrote under a handful of pseudonyms. Could it matter to our experience of the book to know that Brown didn’t live to see Goodnight Moon thrive, that she died young, at 42 in 1952, exiting life with the kind of boisterous exuberance she was known for: cause of death was a cancan-type kick of her leg into the air following a minor surgery. She died instantly of an embolism. In an equally strange twist of fate, in her will, Brown had named the child of a friend the right to all monies earned by her books should he survive her, but the boy, who never completed high school and who gained a reputation for destroying public property and beating people up, grew up to squander the millions.

Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism[previously]

As Brown worked to begin her hoped-for writing career, she also drifted toward teaching. A friend encouraged her to apply to Bank Street, and there she found a community inspired by the relevance of modern ideas to early childhood education: welcoming immigrants and students of all faiths, emphasizing a pragmatic “here and now” curriculum that takes the child’s experience and perspective as its foundation, and embracing the value of a hands-on acquaintance with science and the arts. Even so, Brown’s start was rocky. Deeply interested in the individual child, she was indifferent to classroom management. One progress report notes that she “seemed to contribute a somewhat disorganizing influence to the class.” Most damningly, she left the art closet messy, “with two pots of glue spilled.”
While Brown struggled in the classroom, she excelled in Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s language class. Mitchell recognized that a modern education called for new books. She also saw that she was not the person to write them. In keeping with Bank Street’s emphasis on the here and now, Mitchell wanted children to read about the sights and sounds of their own world, unadorned with fantasy. She joked, in fact, that she was introducing the “spinach school” to children’s literature. In Brown, she found the writer who could make her ideas palatable.

Margaret Wise Brown studied under Gertrude Stein and Lucy Mitchell Sprague.

The Surprising Ingenuity Behind “Goodnight Moon”

At the time, children’s literature still consisted largely of fairy tales and fables. Sprague, basing her ideas on the relatively new science of psychology and on observations of how children themselves told stories, believed that preschoolers were primarily interested in their own small worlds, and that fantasy actually confused and alienated them. “It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” Mitchell wrote. “The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness.”

Under Sprague’s mentorship, Brown wrote about the familiar—animals, vehicles, bedtime rituals, the sounds of city and country—testing her stories on classrooms of young children

Artist Leonard Wisegard was a frequent collaborator, though the iconic illustrations of bunnied, moon, etc. are from Clement Hurd.

Perhaps insightful is Brown's book Mr. Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself - "Once upon a time there was a funny dog named Crispin’s Crispian. He was named Crispin’s Crispian because he belonged to himself. In the mornings, he woke himself up and he went to the icebox and gave himself some bread and milk. He was a funny old dog. He like strawberries."

Margaret Wise Brown, previously
Overthinking, previously
Copyright, previously
Goodnight Shai-Hulud, previously

posted by the man of twists and turns (9 comments total)

My favorite Margaret Wise Brown quote, which might be apocryphal, was in response to an interviewer asking her how she could write children's books when she didn't have any children of her own. "Oh but you see, I was a child." was her reply.
posted by gwint at 1:33 PM on May 31, 2017 [5 favorites]

I'm discovering as an adult with a toddler how many books I loved as a kid (Crispin’s Crispian!?!) were in fact written by Brown.
posted by not_the_water at 1:43 PM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

+1 for the post title. That's the absolute high water mark of that book for me, and each of my three daughters giggled with me at that part every night for years.
posted by ZakDaddy at 2:43 PM on May 31, 2017

Love her work! And, of course the great thing about wishing "goodnight nobody" is waking up the next day and having nobody wish me good morni-- wait oh god I am lonely and confused

:-(
posted by the quidnunc kid at 2:56 PM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

My daughter once asked me why "Goodnight mush" and not "Goodnight bowl full of mush" and it fucked me up for days.
posted by Etrigan at 3:02 PM on May 31, 2017 [4 favorites]

Awhile back I was intrigued to read here that Goodnight Moon was inspired by Gertrude Stein. Hanging out with a friend's toddler I have grown to love that book. He loves it too. He finishes all the lines. I like the last one - Goodnight noises everywhere. "Everywhere" was his first three syllable word.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:15 PM on May 31, 2017

I read Goodnight Moon every night to my 1-year-old. I've noticed that the picture of "three little bears sitting on chairs" itself has a picture on the wall. It looks like a rough sketch of the cow jumping over the moon. If it had been the bears instead: Goodnight recursion. Goodnight infinite bears, goodnight infinite chairs...
posted by pianoblack at 6:20 AM on June 1, 2017

Having read that book to my autistic daughter hundreds of times, "goodnight noises everywhere" is a paean of calm for my soul.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:23 AM on June 1, 2017

Too bad she didn't live long enough to write Good Night Buffoon. Just to help out with preteens getting ready for the dating scene. With three little daughters, I read that book hundreds of times.
posted by Oyéah at 6:07 PM on June 1, 2017