About the Author

"We speak naturally," Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) once observed,"and spend all of our lives trying to write naturally."

Best known as the author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, Brown pioneered in writing stories and poems for the very youngest ages. During a brief but many-faceted and brilliant career, she completed more than one hundred picture books; championed the work of such talented illustrators as Garth Williams and Clement Hurd; pursuaded Gertrude Stein to write her now-classic children's fantasy The World is Round; and helped develop the board book and other fresh approaches to bookmaking for very young children. With seemingly boundless energy and imagination, she kept experimenting, always hoping, as she once said, to "write a book simple enough . . . to lift the child for a few moments from his own problems of shoelaces that won't tie and busy parents . . . into the timeless world of a story."

Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in middle-class comfort on suburban Long Island, where she became a keen observer of nature. To her childhood friends she was known as the neighborhood storyteller, good at concocting tall tales and at putting her own words to old tunes like"Dixie."

Always something of a daydreamer, Brown had a lackluster student career until, as a young woman in the mid-1930's, she enrolled in graduate courses at one of America's most vibrant centers of early childhood development research, New York's Bank Street College of Education. At Bank Street, Brown observed children, listened to the stories and poems they told, and found her own vocation.

The core of the Bank Street philosophy was the belief that children should be made full partners in learning. Brown applied this idea in her writings by working in simple, gamelike forms and structures that the young might readily grasp amd make their own.