Margaret Wise Brown, author of The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon as well as more than a hundred other picture books for children, led a troubled and flamboyant life, although she sometimes described herself as a quiet person. I read Marcus’s biography of Ms. Brown, not for the details of her personal life which are rather sad, but rather for the insights into the history of children’s literature in general and the picture book in particular and for the revelations about and appreciation of the educational philosophies that shaped our teaching of small children and our literature for them.
To sweep the personal stuff out of the way: Ms. Brown was almost married on two separate occasions to two different men, had a long affair with an older married man, and entered into a long term romantic (sexual?) relationship with a twenty years older woman, the divorced wife of actor John Barrymore, who called herself Michael Strange (birth name: Blanche Oelrichs). Margaret Wise Brown was prone to depression, excessive guilt, and angst, but she was also quite generous and mentored many writers and illustrators who later became published and famous in their own right.
The really fascinating material in this book, however, concerns the history and direction of children’s literature in the mid-twentieth century. If I understand the issues correctly, Margaret Wise Brown began her writing for children out of the Bank Street Experimental School, where she was mentored by the school’s founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The school taught two things about writing for children: that books should be centered in the “here and now” (no nostalgic fairy-tale type stories of the idyllic past) and that books before being published should be tested and retested on their intended audience, children.
The rivals to this school of children’s literature were the Librarians.The librarians were epitomized by New York Public Library’s head of children’s services, Anne Carroll Moore. Ms. Moore was the recognized authority on children’s books in the years before World War II. “Her stamp of approval or disapproval was often widely accepted as final judgment on a book.” Anne Carroll Moore did not appreciate the “here and now” school of thought and at one point in the book she dismisses a group of pre-publication books brought to her for prior approval by one of Brown’s publishers as “truck”.
The controversy between the here and now school of writers and illustrators—Ruth Krauss, Esphyr Slobodkina, Clement and Edith Thacher Hurd, Leonard Weisgard, and Margaret herself as well as others who followed in their footsteps—and the Librarians and their followers was one of esthetics versus practicality. The Librarians preferred books with the best literary content, the most refined forms of traditional art, and inspiring characters and plot. The Here-and-Now-ers believed in accessible, straightforward prose that was also somewhat poetic in its images that a child could understand and appreciate and contemporary, realistic settings. Even the animal characters in the here-and-now books were not magical or fantastical but rather stand-ins for human characters with here-and-now speech and actions and concerns. Anne Carroll Moore and her librarian coterie championed books such as Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, Marcia Brown’s folk tales such as Cinderella and Stone Soup, and Claire Huchet Bishop’s The Five Chinese Brothers. They liked books set in exotic places and times and books that challenged the literary muscles of children who read them.
Of course, now we look back and say, “Why can’t we have both?” Fantasy and reality, here and now but also there and then, poetry and prose and all things in between. Pictures that are abstract and fantastical and illustrations that are realistic and simple and accessible, all kinds of artistic expression can be found in the picture books of the last century, all beginning with the controversy that eventually resolved into a smorgasbord of picture books for all tastes.
I recommend this biography of Margaret Wise Brown to all those who have an interest in children’s literature and the publishing industry and the educational movements and philosophies of the the twentieth century. There’s much more to read about in the book. I haven’t even talked about the influence of Gertrude Stein on Ms. Brown’s books, an influence I would never have known about if I hadn’t read this book. And just the details of how different books were conceived and brought to fruition was enlightening and thought-provoking. Maybe I should write a picture book, although I’m told, in this biography and in many other things I’ve read, that it’s harder than it looks to write a good children’s picture book.
