Margaret Wise Brown, Author

Goodnight Moon is my son's favorite book. Hovering in the third place slot is The Runaway Bunny. Both are books by Margaret Wise Brown. Many of this early 20th century author's stories feature animals as the main characters and a definite pattern or rhythm. Her approach was to write stories the way kids wanted to hear a story, not how adults tend to tell them.

Tonight while reading GM to my son, as I flipped the last page I noted a blurb about Ms Brown which indicated that she only lived to the age of 42. Out of curiosity I looked up her up on Wikipedia and found out she was quite an interesting lady who lived a relatively full life in a short time. Born in Connecticut in 1910, she began writing children's books at the age of 22 while working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City and wrote hundreds of works over the next twenty years.

Brown died unexpectedly of an embolism while on a book tour in Nice, France. According to Wikipedia, two weeks after an emergency... kicking up her leg to show the doctor how well she was feeling ironically caused a blood clot, which had formed in her leg, to dislodge and travel to her heart. A very strange ending, indeed, but the works she created have long outlived her and will be her legacy for generations to come. I can't wait to dig into more of her tales with my son.