Margaret
Wise Brown, the children’s author I’ve idolized for decades, once wrote a
fascinating and delightful book for children called The Little Island. The book
was about Maine and the coastal islands, which she loved. As Leonard Marcus expressed in his book, Awakened By the Moon, “The Little Island
points to a sense of the world as a vast and
various place in which one needs never feel dwarfed or over-shadowed. And it was good to be a little island. A part of the world and a world of its own
all surrounded by the bright blue sea.”
Margaret
easily made friends with the fishermen of Maine, who admired her physical
strength and tenacity. The only home she
ever owned she called The Only
House. It was an abandoned quarry
master’s house on an island.
Born in the
spring of 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, Margaret was always a daydreamer. She loved animals and had many pets as a
child—rabbits, squirrels, guinea pigs, goldfish, cats, and dogs. She and her siblings once buried a small
animal they found. In her early
children’s book, The Dead Bird, Margaret
wrote, “And every day, until they forgot, the children went and sang to their
little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave.”
One of the
unique things about Margaret Wise Brown is that she told stories about the
child’s world from the child’s point of view.
Her words were often like poetry—simple, emotional, meaningful and
tender with some added mystery and intrigue.
In her brief life of 42 years, she wrote over 100 books. She was unique, whimsical, extremely
creative, and original—an individualist who wasn’t afraid to test the “norms”
of children’s literature at the time.
She understood young children and was an imaginative storyteller, even
at the age of six. She once wrote,
“There is a loving way with words and an unloving way, and it is only with the
loving way that the simplicity of language becomes beautiful.”
In a
December 1946 Life magazine article Margaret revealed that she often wrote
drafts of stories on shopping lists and scraps of paper. I could definitely relate to that, and it’s
often easier to write on those small scraps; the difficulty is finding where
you put them. Still, I try to cut myself
a little slack, knowing that a brilliant children’s author frequently did the
same.
Margaret was
sometimes restless and impatient and felt like she was wasting time if she
waited to write a book. She was often
not predictable and was known to use many different illustrators, but she used
Clement Hurd often. He understood the
needs of children for safety and security.
If you read her classic children’s books, Goodnight Moon and Runaway
Bunny, you can’t help but fall in love with the wonderful illustrations.
Margaret
Wise Brown died in 1952 at the age of 42.
Leonard Marcus, in his biography of her, wrote: “Nearly everyone spoke of her in heartfelt
superlatives, as an “irreplaceable” friend and the most creative person they
had ever met.” She was charming and a
one-of-a-kind author. She could be
complicated and even complex, but as one who’s spent hundreds of hours reading
stories to young children, I find her absolutely fascinating and a child’s best
friend. Her stories are full of simple
wisdom and playfulness, as well as an understanding of the way children view
the world. They’re valued reading on
their own, even if you don’t have young children in your life. They’re absolute joy and pure magic. What a fascinating author and woman; how I
wish I could have met her!
