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Margaret Wise Brown
(May 23, 1910 - November 13, 1952) U.S.A.

Margaret Wise Brown

Writer

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Margaret Wise Brown is best known for wonderful children's picture books such as, Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, The Important Book, The Golden Egg Book, and her Caldecott Award winning The Little Island. Her simple yet touching books have been at the centre of young children's reading for decades and will continue to do so for the years to come.

Margaret was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. While Brown's family was wealthy, they were frugal with their earnings. This constant attention to financial concern did not allow Brown to have a close relationship with her parents. Her childhood was spent as the middle of three children in suburban Beechurst, Long Island.

Margaret Wise BrownKnown to her friends as "Tim" because her golden hair colour resembled that of timothy hay, Margaret attended a well-to-do boarding school in 1923 in Switzerland because her parents were in India. After graduation in 1928, Brown's father told her to settle down and not go to college. Brown's mother, however, did not agree and allowed Brown to go to Hollins College near Roanoke, Virginia. After graduating for Hollins in 1932, Brown moved back to New York to live with her parents.

Margaret first received encouragement to write while as an undergraduate student at Hollins College. However, it would still be sometime before a literary career would become clear. It was while enrolled in the teacher training program of New York's Bureau of Educational Experiments that Brown wrote her first children's stories beginning with When the Wind Blew (1937).

Margaret was strongly influenced by Lucy Sprague Mitchell's ideas on the types of stories children of a very young age needed. Lucy found that children under the age of six best responded to stories about the every day world, which was very amazing to them. She saw that they weren't very interested in stories of fantasy involving such things as kings or castles.

Margaret Wise BrownIn 1936 Mitchell got Brown and several other writers together to put together an anthology titled Another Here and Now Story Book. In 1938, Brown's work led her to become involved with launching a small publishing firm called William R. Scott, Inc.. With Brown as editor it worked to put "Here and Now" type books into the market. This proved to be a good place for Margaret to publish her own works.

To give herself a writing refuge, Brown bought a small house off the coast of Maine, which she dubbed "The Only House." This cottage on the beach did not have electricity, a telephone, or a bathroom. In this way, Brown put forth many books which helped define the role and face of children's book publishing. She continued getting her own books published at a fast pace, having authored more than one hundred volumes. One of her books was The Little Island, a book based on "The Only House," which won the Caldecott Medal for Leonard Weisgard's illustrations, the only Award that one of Brown's books would receive.

While on a book tour in France, Margaret was stricken with appendicitis and immediately taken to the hospital in Nice. After her recovery, Brown confided in her sister about how afraid she was when she had taken ill. When Brown, in a lively mood, was about to be released from the hospital, when she kicked her leg can-can style and blacked out from an embolism that rushed from her leg to her brain. Unfortunately, Margaret Wise Brown died unexpectedly at the age of 42. As requested in her will, Brown's ashes were scattered at sea by her refuge, "The Only House".

Her over one hundred children's books include the classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon.

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