July 10, 2025 • 49 mins
Today, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon is considered a classic. The deceptively complex children’s book has been passed down for generations. But if the New York Public Library had gotten its way, you’d have never even heard of it.
*
Thanks to our Very Special guests Amy Gary, author of In the Great Green Room; and writer, children's book author, and podcaster Betsy Bird.
*
Hosted by Zaron Burnett, Dana Schwartz, and Jason English
Written by Carmen Borca-Carrillo and edited by Emily Rudder at Wonder Media Network
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Chris Childs
Mixing and Mastering by Chris Childs
Additional Editing by Mary Dooe
Fact-Checking by Maya Shoukri
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Voice Actors: Katie Mattie, Chris Childs, Josh Fisher, Jonathan Washington, Juliet English, and Charlotte English
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
In the Great Green Room, there was a telephone and
a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping
over the moon.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Those words have been spoken aloud at countless bedtimes. Parents
and children generations over can recite them from memory, but
few know who it was who committed those famous lines
to the page? Can you name the author of good
Night Moon?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I didn't even realize that Margaret was my favorite author
when I was a child.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
This is Amy Gary, author of in the Great Green Room.
The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret wise Brown.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
She did a lot of books that a lot of
people don't know she wrote. She's much more famous for
her works than for her name.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
In her lifetime, Margaret wise Brown published more than one
hundred books. The prolific author also wrote many many more
works that went unpublished for years. More than seventy of
Margaret's unpublished manuscripts sat hidden in a cedar trunk in Vermont.
The trunk was stored in the attic of her sister
Roberta's home.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
So I thought, oh my god, they've got to be ruined,
because the Vermont winners are brutal, and there's just no
way these papers would have survived.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Amy's concerns are born of experience. She was part of
a small publishing company. She knew books and how delicate
they can be. She first got to know Roberta thanks
to her efforts to reprint some of Margaret's older works.
They got to talking, and then a few months later
Amy found herself hunched over at her desk looking at
over five hundred pages of unpublished manuscripts.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
It was onion skin paper, which is this really really
thin paper, and they were stacked to end. This trunk
was full, completely in to end of things. Margaret had
left behind.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Books, music, poems, personal notes. The trunk held a veritable
treasure of all sorts of things Margaret Wise Brown set
down on paper, very very delicate paper. For more than
thirty years, Amy has published selections from the trunk of
treasures from Margaret's written life, and along the way, a
(02:31):
striking portrait of Margaret has emerged.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
She found joy where she could find joy, and she
lived hard. She lived well.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
I hope to write something serious one day, as soon
as I have something to say, But I am stuck
in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one
wants to move on.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Margaret Wise Brown was a rare one. She lived part
time on an island in Maine in an abandoned shack
with no running water or electricity. She blew royalty checks
on brand new Chryslers and transatlantic vacations. She died doing
a can can kick, and when she passed she left
her fortune to a nine year old neighbor. But none
of those anecdotes are the main course for today's episode.
(03:14):
Today's story is about her deceptively complex classic children's book
Goodnight Moon, because if the New York Public Library had
gotten its way, you would have never even heard of it.
This is Very Special Episodes, and I'm your host, Sarah
Burnett Today's episode Goodnight Moon.
Speaker 5 (03:41):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I'm Jason, She's Dana.
He's Zaren. Do you guys read Goodnight Moon as a kid. Oh?
Speaker 6 (03:48):
I loved Goodnight Moon.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Completely, big fan favorite in the Burnette household. Dana, do
you plan to read good Night Moon to you're young
and keep the tradition going?
Speaker 6 (03:56):
You know, we actually don't have it. I have a
seven month old baby. Is the shock update of this
episode of Very Special Episodes. And we have a lot
of kids books. We're in a big green Eggs and
ham fades. I'm also reading Chester's Way a lot, which
is very fun for me, but he is too young
to kind of even absorb it. Like there's baby books
(04:19):
for him those are so boring. So I'm just like
reading books for older kids to him that I kind
of enjoy it.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
Right seven months of the same baby.
Speaker 6 (04:27):
Book exactly, So I'm just like reading what I want.
I just ordered and this is exciting. King Big Goods
in the Bathtub, which I remember reading when I was
a kid. Stay tuned to see whether Arthur likes that one.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
My grandma Nana, she turned ninety four this week. She
got my kids a Hallmark version of good Night Moon
where she got to record herself narrating it and then
nailed it.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Oh.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
I don't know if Hallmark still has access to this technology,
but it was an incredible gift. She has a very nice,
soothing voice, so they probably for several years every night
I heard Nana reading Goodnight Moon to them, and she
added some like DVD commentary about what what else was
happening on the page and whatnot. It was delightful. So
(05:16):
I have a very positive association with the book. That's
such a good gifts like a good literary feud, especially
one that involves librarians. So this hits all the boxes
for me.
Speaker 6 (05:29):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Margaret wise Brown was born in Brooklyn in nineteen ten,
the middle child of three in a well to do family.
Her parents sent her off to attend boarding schools in
Switzerland and Massachusetts, and when she was home, she was
not expected to follow the traditional roles common for girls
of that age. Her father encouraged her to enjoy the outdoors,
(05:53):
to hunt and to fish. She was a talented beagler.
It's a type of small game hunting where the hunter
runs along alongside a pack of hunting dogs. Margaret had
no problem keeping up.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
She traveled extensively as a child. She knew what was interesting,
and she had kept diaries her whole life since childhood,
and she would just go back into her diaries, remind
herself of what she was feeling at different times throughout
her life, and draw on those emotions put something into writing.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
When Margaret was growing up, fairy tales were the preferred
stories her children. Princes, fairies, dragons, they were all the rage.
But when Margaret began to pen her own stories, they
focused on the real world of what was around her,
what she directly saw, felt, and smelled.
Speaker 7 (06:44):
A bug in a rug, a bug in the grass,
a bug on the sidewalk, a bug in a glass.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
After graduating from Holland's College in Virginia, she moved back
to New York. Margaret began submitting short fiction to magazines, unsuccessfully,
but her writing output in those days was prolific and unconventional.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Big as the whole world, deep as a giant.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Margaret seemed to love words above all else. She told
one professor she hated writing stories. Quote with plots.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Quiet is electricity rushing about the world.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I can read yet another little furry bunny doing something,
little furry animal doing something, and I come away amazed
at how perfect her poetry is.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Quiet as electricity, rushing about the world, quiet as mud.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
These are the sentences. Margaret treasured her prized audience, and
as far as she was concerned that the best authors
around were children, specifically five year olds. As she once
wrote in an.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Essay, all these are five year old similes. Let the
grown up writer for children equal or better them if
he can.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Margaret also tried to become a teacher, again unsuccessfully. She
wasn't great at leading a classroom, much like her writing.
She was a bit unfocused, much like her young students.
And then Margaret found a kindred soul.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Lucy Mitchell said, I may have created the here and
now philosophy, but Margaret gave it wings, and she did.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Lucy Sprague Mitchell was an educator who taught at Berkeley.
A woman dissatisfied with the gap between girls and boys education,
so she upended the educational system.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Prior to Margaret and her mentor's work on children's literature,
girls and boys had been educated separately. Girls had one
track of education, boys had another.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
In separate classrooms. Girls were taught simpler mathematics, less complex theories,
materials far different from what boys learned, which made it
impossible for girls to be on equal footing when they
were placed in a co ed course in college with boys.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
So Lucy Mitchell her mentor had been at the high
levels of education within the California system and realized you
had to take it all the way down to the
kindergarten level and start from there. So she brought in
all of these different methods from around the world to
help move education forward, hopefully making it as she called it,
(09:17):
democratic for boys and girls to be educated, not only
for girls to be educated equally, but for boys to
see the girls as equals. So one of the things
that they did was they wanted them to be able
to use the same language within literature.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
The Bank Street School theorized that in order for education
to really be quote equal, boys and girls needed to
be reading the same things, learning the same lessons, seeing
themselves through the same lenses.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
But if you took textbooks for literature and tried to
have it be taught in a classroom that were fairy
tales and fables, and you still had the trend of
girls looking for me mauraged to be their ultimate goal.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
The same books Margaret had grown up on were still
the ones she began to teach to her students. Well,
that wouldn't do for a revolutionary classroom in the nineteen thirties,
so she enrolled at Lucy's Bank Street Cooperative School for teachers,
and Margaret did what she did best, She wrote for children.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So she and Margaret began writing textbooks to forward stories
that used characters that they created. More than that, they
wanted to give children their own words back to them.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
The Bank Street school philosophy was based on the here
and now storybook, or what Lucy had dubbed here and Now.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
The here and now philosophy was, we're going to give
the child their own world back to them their own
here and now. It was a very unique way to
approach a child's world. We're not going to talk down
to the child. We're going to talk to the child.
We're going to talk to them at their level. Instead
of expecting them to be little adults, we're going to
(11:05):
talk to them as children, and we're going to give
them their world as they see it and let them
be who they are.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
If we are writing for these delights and interests of
five year olds, we must remember them and experience them
in our stories. And another thing, no matter how important
we know little kittens and steam engines to be to
a five year old, no one can ever write about
them without a real love for them and familiarity with
them in some form, actual or remembered.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
So they would have children write stories for the teachers,
and then they would take the stories look at the
words the children used around a particular event. They would
take that vocabulary and by age rank the words that
the children used and then use that list of vocabulary
(11:54):
to be able to write their stories for children.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
The educators quite literally let the children pick the words
for the adults to compose into sentences. The words were
ones that kids connected with, savored, and enjoyed. The children
would also become the words.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
And then they would also physically let the children become
different characters, like buzzing bees or pretend to be a dog.
Then they would note what the children did as that dog.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
They did the same with illustrations. They brought in artists
and let the kids be the judges of which pictures
spoke to them.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
And if it didn't ring true to the children, the
illustrators were sent back to try again, because sometimes it
didn't really look like a car to the children, or
it didn't really look like a dog to the children.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
This was key because the kids saw the world with
their tiny eyes of wonder. The educators wanted the adult
artists to do the same.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
She wanted true fine artists to learn how to illustrate
for children because they were to see the world differently
as well. How do you take something that is bold
and different and put it into something a child would see?
How do you have an illustrator, recreate sound through art,
have a jagged piece of art, illustrate what it is
(13:16):
she's trying to portray through her words.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
The educators also pulled from the emerging field of child
psychology to help craft their stories.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
They both were very much aware of how psychology played
into a child's mind at different ages. A really good
example of this is Runaway Bunny.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Around the age of two, a child begins to see
themselves as separate being from a parent.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
If you run away, said his mother, I will run
after you, for you are my little bunny.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
And it's scary. It's a very scary thing for the child.
They have this sort of love hate relationship with being
an independent being. So Margaret knew about this French love
song that she had heard when she was in boarding
school in Switzerland.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
The love song is the musical account of an unwelcome advance.
There's a relentless pursuer and a narrator who wants nothing
to do with them. Think if you pursue me, I'll
become a fish to escape you. If you become a fish,
I'll become an eel to hunt you down that kind
of thing.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
If you run after me, said the little bunny, I
will become a fish in a trout stream, and I
will swim away from you.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Margaret knew that sort of if you then I changing
method would really work in terms of the mother child relationship,
but doing it in terms of safety instead of threatening.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
If you become a fish in a trout stream, said
his mother, I will become a fisherman, and I will
fish for you.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Those kinds of psychological assurances worked really well for the
runaway bunny, and she knew it would because she understood
that psychology that plays well for that particular age. So
assurances giving back to the children what they heard, they saw,
they understood at those particular ages was crucial to helping
(15:16):
a child begin to understand their own world.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
The children were in charge. Margaret was simply a wordsmith.
She selected from the children's vocabulary, She borrowed from their
language of sights and sounds and smells, and then in
their rhythms, she transformed the children's words into poetry. She
was like a dj of syllables and phonetic phrases that
delight children. Ever, the child herself, Margaret was very good
(15:43):
at it.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
She knew how to comfort a child because she had
sought some of that comfort on her own as a child.
She knew what she needed as a child and remembered
what she needed.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Shucks, said the bunny. I might just as well stay
where I am and be your little bunny. And so
he did have a carrot, said the mother bunny.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Margaret's world of bunnies and bugs and of curious eyes
peering through bushes resonated with children, and it was profitable too.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
As the popularity of the here and now philosophy grew
in terms of the publications being bought and other publishers
adopting this idea that yes, we can publish directly to
the marketplace and not just take fairy tales and fables
and redo them. And it was the wild West of
(16:33):
children's publishing, and it was a lot of arguments within
the publishing world itself.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Margaret wasn't just satisfied with revolutionizing children's books. She wanted everything,
every part of the publishing process to become better.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
We're going to now have golden books sold at pennies
instead of dollars, and everybody can have books in their homes.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Little Golden Books. The publisher for many of Margaret's works
specialized in those durable, hardcover, brightly colorful, and importantly affordable
children's books. Usually the publisher printed in both color and
black and white to save on printing costs. The low
cost books were successful, but they also lowered the esteem
for the writers and illustrators who worked with the publisher.
(17:21):
Other book companies came to the conclusion that.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
If they worked for Golden Books, they were going to
be doing cheap books. And Margaret went on a stump
tour of publishing panels and just said, there is no
such thing as cheap books. If you have good writing
and good illustrations, that's quality. With Golden Books, we are
(17:46):
giving them just some of the best stuff that's out there. Yes,
it might be priced more cheaply, but the quality is there.
And you know what, those same books are still on
the racks today.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Margaret also did the same sort of goodwill tour for illustrators.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
She worked very closely with her illustrators, which we do
not do in publishing anymore. You have an illustrator over
here and an author over here, and near the two
shell meet. But she invited her illustrators to come and
work and collaborate with her, because they really were defining
a whole new way to make books for children. Very interactive.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
As a businesswoman, she made the books she wanted to
read and to look at.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
At the time she started working, illustrators were paid nothing,
and she realized that if she were to keep these
illustrators that she loved working for her, they had to
make as much as she made. And so she went
to her publishers and said pay them more, and they said, nope,
we're not going to do it. She said, well, then
(18:47):
split my royalties with them. She demanded that her publishers,
if they're not going to use something, she wanted her
rights back, and she also fought to keep rights that
they weren't going to use. All of the ructures that
she created we still use in publishing today. Every single
royalty structure she created is still in place.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Once Margaret's books were in wide circulation and readers loved them,
that's when the publishers who'd previously turned up their noses
at Lucy's Here and now approached to Kitty Litt were
suddenly lining up to knock on her door. According to Amy,
at one point, demand for Margaret's books was so strong
she was writing for six different publishers under different pen names.
(19:33):
She was also working across genres. Margaret wrote children's books,
but she also penned adult poems, she wrote music, and
she was even beginning to branch out to TV and
to radio.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I have mad respect for this woman. Her telegrams to
her publishers were things like I better not see you
on the streets of Paris, or I'm going to shoot
you with my bow and arrow. So was she did
it with such grace and he ilarity that they couldn't
really be mad at her. And she was right, darn it,
she was right.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Despite becoming an adult author and successful children's lit author,
Margaret still hadn't really grown up. Ever, the big kid
success certainly didn't spoil her. She remained a true eccentric character.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Margaret was always with the dog in tow if she
could be. When she was in New York City. He
was known to peddle on people at bus stops and
pretty much get up to no good anytime he was
with her.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Allegedly, one time, Margaret tried to leave her dog in
her convertible. The dog wasn't into that idea. So she
tied his leash to the steering wheel and she went
about her business.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
In no time he was you know, I think he
pulled the steering wheel off the car with his leash
and was running down the street or something.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
After that, she came to the only reasonable conclusion. She
decided it was best if she kept her dog with
her wherever she went. One day, Margaret, she showed up
to a business meeting with her agent.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
And she was carrying these two ice cream cones with her,
and she thought, oh, how lovely Margaret's brought us ice cream.
And Margaret's down and begins to give the dog ice
cream cones, not the staff, but the dog, so that
she could have her meetings with her dog in tow.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Margaret's life was entirely her own. Basically, she lived a
sort of life she'd want to write about. There wasn't
much daylight between the quirky stories she wrote and the
days she lived and enjoyed to their fullest. In her thirties,
Margaret moved into a small apartment in Manhattan. But it
was not what you may be picturing. It wasn't a
(21:40):
tall building. In fact, it was another shack. It was
a small white clapboard shack low to the ground in
Greenwich Village.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
It was a little house in the middle of a
big city, and nobody knew it was there.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
She'd go on to write some of her most beloved
works in and about her secret big city shack. She
wrote about her home in a book, The Hidden House.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
It had been there for years and years, for over
one hundred years, forgotten, and there it stood, in a
hidden garden in the middle of the big block of skyscrapers.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
At her studio Cobble Court, named after the cobblestone streets
that surrounded her hidden house. Margaret continued to compose poetry
and literature according to the philosophy of here and.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
Now the Great Green Room.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Perhaps she never fully realized how consequential those everyday settings
and mundane objects would become.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
There was a telephone, but.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
She saw the world with a child's eyes, the kind
that can enliven anything, even the most mundane, like wallpaper.
One time, Margaret grew enamored with the bold colors of
a neighbor's apartment.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
She wanted it to feel like you were walking into
a Spanish painting. And she's seen this apartment with the
bold red, bold green, bold yellow, and she wanted to
recreate that in the book, or she.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Could find a world in the nooks and crannies of
her studio.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
And a young mouse, and so the mouse that was
in the hall, which I think she really did have
a mouse in that little tiny apartment of hers. That
it is based on physically is it is cobblecorp.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Margaret also recalled the nighttime spent in her childhood bedroom
calling out to the moon with her sister.
Speaker 7 (23:25):
ROBERTA good night room, good night moon, good night cow,
jumping over the moon, good night light in the red balloon.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
The actual idea from Goodnight Moon came from her childhood
with her sister. She and her sister would say good
night to all the things in the room as they
were going to bed.
Speaker 7 (23:44):
Good Night bears, goodnight chairs.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Can you picture the room from the book. There's the
three bright walls, nearly askew, nestled against the far wall.
There's a crackling fireplace, tucked safe and cozy inside the
sheets of the big red bed. There's a little bunny
and peering in through the windows, surrounded by a starry night.
Is a bright white full moon when it came out
(24:13):
in nineteen forty seven. Good Night Moon won praise from
The New York Times, The Paper of Record highlighted the
book's rhythms and it's now iconic illustrations, which certainly expressed
the philosophy of here and now.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
And she was also publishing a lot of discussions about
whether or not she should blend fantasy into reality. Margaret
wanted every child to see themselves within a story by
placing animals as the protagonist. So as you notice in
Goodnight Moon there's a bunny in that bed. It's not
(24:47):
a child, it's a bunny. So every child can see
themselves as that bunny. Doesn't matter, gender, doesn't matter, race.
And at some point they actually thought about making the
old lady human and instead made her bunny because that
would have broken that wall of fantasy of the bunny.
And then do you clothe the animals? Do you not?
(25:10):
I mean, like, where do you blend that reality and fantasy.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
While Margaret was successfully reimagining the style and the philosophy
of books for kids, not everyone loved her big new
ideas for how to change children's literature. Remember how we
said the New York Public Library would get involved in
all this, stay tuned for the lions about to roar.
Speaker 8 (25:40):
Let's just be frank about it. Goodnight Moon is a
weird book. The color scheme is weird. There's a tiger's
skin on the ground. Bunnies shoot tigers. Sure everyone is
bunny's for some reason.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
That's Betsy Bird. Now, Betsy wasn't there to bad mouth
good Night Moon back in nineteen forty seven. But she
is a librarian and formerly with the New York Public Library,
which is how she knows so much about one certain
librarian who did sharpen her knives for good Night Moon.
Speaker 8 (26:11):
There's certainly no plot, and then it kind of goes,
heywhy where it's like good night nobody? Like what are
we saying good night to the void?
Speaker 6 (26:18):
You know?
Speaker 8 (26:19):
Any way you slice it, this was a strange book.
Anne Carroll Moore did not approve of it for Newer
Public Library, which meant it didn't get added to near
Public Library.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
And Carol Moore in many many of the stories you
may read or hear about Margaret wise Brown, this librarian
comes off as the villain. And Carol Moore, she'd been
head of the New York Public Library's Children's section by
nineteen forty seven, she was working in a consulting role.
Speaker 8 (26:49):
So Anne Carroll Moore was, as I say, pretty much
what you kind of picture when you picture a library.
If you look at photographs of her, she's very stately,
you know, good straight back on her.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Take your expectations for a stern, no nonsense librarian, and
then crank it up to ten and then past ten
up to eleven. She was that extra. Even though people
liked to portray Anne and Margaret as diametric opposites, both
women were equally eccentric.
Speaker 8 (27:17):
She had a little wooden Dutch doll named Nicholas, whom
she would speak to on a regular basis. It was
probably seen as a little weird then, it's certainly seen
as a little weird now. So people would make tiny
things for Nicholas, and she would keep them in a
large case. There was a tiny faberget egg from a
former Russian countess I believe, who had escaped the country
(27:42):
prior to the revolution, and so just imagine like the
world's tiniest faberge egg.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Despite her tiny wooden Dutch doll, Nicholas, or the tiniest
faberget egg, and her sordid treasure trove of oddities and gifts,
and Carol Moore held enormous influence in the book world,
and not just over libraries, but over books all over
the country. Her name was synonymous with children's literature.
Speaker 8 (28:08):
And Carroll Moore was completely known by everyone everywhere. She
was the person who started children's services at near public library,
and she had had huge sway over not just children's
book collections in New York, but all over the country
thanks to her newsletters and her choices and her best
of books of the yearless so when I came in,
(28:30):
her name was synonymous with what it meant to be
a children's librarian and the name.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
To know and children's lit Because before and Carol Moore,
children's literature didn't exist, not really, not in the way
we might think of it.
Speaker 8 (28:45):
So to really understand how important Ann Carroll Moore was,
you kind of have to understand what the state of
children's book publishing was at that time. If you wanted
a children's book, the bookstores there were mostly favored adult books,
and so you'd probably have to go to the library.
The librarians had more sway over the children's book industry
than anyone else. Ann Carl Moore sort of led the
(29:07):
charge at New York Public Library, and all children's authors, illustrators,
and even editors would come to her. They wanted her
stamp of approval. What she approved, librarians around the country
would purchase.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Ann's power was so great she held sway over bookstores
and libraries all across the country. She was also involved
in the creation of the Newberry and the Caldecott Awards,
which are today two of the most prestigious awards in
children's literature.
Speaker 8 (29:36):
And as a result, you know, it very much depended
on what she saw was good and what was bad.
And what she thought was bad were things that she
called truck.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Not like what you might drive. Truck was Anne's portmanteau
for books she saw as part toy and part book,
and worthless as both.
Speaker 8 (29:53):
Truck was no good, So books that seemed like toys
like Pat the Bunny Truck series, like Nancy Drew Truck,
Let's see the comics. Oh do I even have to
say it? Truck truck Truck. She really wanted kids books
to be seen as their own legitimate literature form, and
she was hugely influential in getting people to believe that.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Anne's mission doesn't sound particularly villainous. She wanted to provide
the children of America with good, clean books, stories written
for kids, and being a traditionalist, naturally, she preferred fairy tales.
Speaker 8 (30:28):
This is why if you go into many an older
children's room, you'll find a huge fairy tale folk tale
collections section. That's because that's what librarians wanted.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Fairy tales and folk tales, the exact same stories. Margaret
grew up reading the exact same stories that made her
want to go full on Bank Street School and revolutionized
children's lit. But her rival, Anne Carol Moore disagreed on
philosophical grounds. She believed the only good books were the
fantasies because that's what Anne Carrol Moore liked.
Speaker 8 (31:02):
She felt that children lived in sort of a magical
time and there was this certain kind of book that
suited them better. She liked fantasy quite a lot. She
was not as big a fan of realism, and she
certainly wasn't a fan of when realism and fantasy intertwined.
This is kind of one of the reasons she clashed
(31:24):
with new thinkings about childhood that came out of places
like the Bank Street School of Education, and of course
who came out of the Bank Street School of Education,
Margaret wise Brown.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Anne opposed everything Margaret stood for, all the thoughts she'd
put into how to best blend the real world with
the fantastic, the time she spent learning how to play
with anomanopea the way children do, to make her words
sing like poetry and sound like childhood, no matter to
her the stern head librarian and Carol Moore, she wasn't listening.
Speaker 8 (31:55):
So the Bank Street College of Education, they had a
very specific way of teaching their educators. You see how
kids see things, you think how kids think, and you
don't disparage it in any way. So it's funny that
Anne Carroll Moore was trying to get a form of
legitimacy for literature for the actual kids themselves. She was
(32:19):
not interested in the psychology of the child. She was
interested in giving them the best books, which she would
determine because she was an adult, and quite frankly, if
you let kids choose, they'd choose something she didn't approve of.
So this was almost a philosophical difference that they had
with one another. But for Ann Carroll Moore, children's books
(32:41):
had a very specific role that they were supposed to fit,
and anything that didn't fit into that role was seen
as other and therefore suspicious and maybe not as good
as kids deserved.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Nineteen forty seven, Good Night Moon was published. That meant
the two rivals were guaranteed a face off because Margaret
had to make the pilgrimage to the New York Public
Library to make her case before Anne Carroll Moore.
Speaker 8 (33:08):
And like everyone else, Margaret wise Brown had to make
that trip and try to sell her very unique style
to Anne Carroll Moore. And Ann Carroll Moore, you cannot
say she never added a Margaret wise Brown book to
her shelf. She did, but she didn't add them all.
So there were certain titles she didn't add, and one
(33:29):
of them was, without a doubt, Good Night Moon.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
What was the result of her pilgrimage to the New
York Public Library A clear, resounding, and now legendary no.
Ann Carroll Moore ruled that the New York Public Library
would not carry Good Night Moon. Looking back, we can't
know what was going through Anne's mind when she made
that decision, but thanks to those long forgotten papers from
(33:54):
a cedar chest, Betsy Bird does have an idea or
two about why this the book was rejected and not
others from Margaret Wise.
Speaker 8 (34:03):
Brown Bunnies had worked with Runaway Bunny, though these bunnies
were wearing clothes and had telephones and owned cats. Let's
just think about that. So, like I say, there's a
level of weird internal logic going on there. Andermore did
not deal well with weird internal logic.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
There were other classics and Carol Moore barred from the
library shelves. Charlotte's Webb and Stuart Little come to mind.
They were on Anne's no Library list to give you
a better idea of what classics she would call truck
But in the case of good Night Moon.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
And Carroll Moore came out very much against all of
the here and now books.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Here's Amy Gary with Margaret's side of the story.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
There are many letters back and forth between Margaret and
Bill Scott, the publisher, about what they're going to do
about the fact that New York Public Library, a very
prominent stalwart in terms of library and content, would not
carry the books or review them. And it was frustrating
for them because it was just a hard line in
(35:08):
the sand against what they were doing.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yes, this major librarian's book review and support would boost
her new book's popularity. But Margaret was also a well
established author. She and the publishers had other ways to
get reviews, mainly through newspapers.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
However, it's still felt like a very personal slight to her.
There are letters from where she is written to Ursula.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
That's Ursula Nordstrom, who's a well known children's book.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Editor, about how it hurt to be treated so poorly
by Anne Carol Moore. And I hurt for her because
she wanted that acceptance as a writer of not children's books,
but children's literature. And I will say, you know, she
may have lost the battle, but she sure as heck
won the war.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Looking at Margaret and and here were two brilliant women
entirely dedicated to their shared goal to legitimize and advance
the promise of children's literature. Just like Margaret wise Brown
and Carol Moore wanted to give children their own literature
because she also cared about kids. And keep in mind,
this was at a time when having a childhood like
(36:27):
we know it was a luxury and not common.
Speaker 8 (36:31):
This is not long after a time when children simply
were not even allowed in libraries, the idea of creating
a space for them was still relatively new, because children
were grimy, disgusting many adults and did not deserve their
own space. I mean, half the time if the kid
was working class a had coal dust on their hands.
(36:51):
She was someone who truly believed that children not only
belonged in the library, but they deserved to have really
good books for themselves in the library.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Perhaps even more radically, and believed all children should have
access to stories. While Margaret wanted to make education between
boys and girls more egalitarian and knew that opening a
children's library in New York City meant opening a new
library in one of the most diverse cities in the world,
and she intended to reflect that diversity in the shelves
(37:23):
of the children's library.
Speaker 8 (37:24):
She wasn't just saying white, rich kids need to be
in the library. She literally wanted every single child in
the library. Under her watch and the watch of her successors,
that system was set up with the understanding that all
children belonged in the library. And then, of course, yes,
she was buying books from around the world, which quite
(37:46):
frankly is difficult to do today, and then they had
to be good books. So she would find the best
books in other languages for kids and put them in
the library for them specifically. So this is what she
believed a library was and could do.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
To be clear, many of these books, while they may
have been in a different language, were intended to help
immigrant children assimilate and to quote, become more American. Still,
what Anne believed in was quality literature for children, just
like Margaret did. They wanted kids to read things that mattered.
Where they didn't quite see eye to eye was the
(38:23):
question of what mattered.
Speaker 8 (38:25):
It is so easy to be on the side of
Margaret wise Brown. She's more fun than Anne Carroll Moore,
and Carroll Moore is literally the librarian that shoushes you.
Margaret wise Brown died because she did the can can
for fun in her hospital bed. I mean literally, they
could not be more diametrically opposed in so many ways.
(38:47):
So I have a lot of sympathy as a result
for what I consider to be the underdog in this story,
and that's Anne Carroll Moore and Carrol Moore did not
destroy Margaret wise Brown's career, and in fact, possibly we
kept some of her lesser good books out of the
library I don't think she deeply loathed Margaret wise Brown.
I just don't think she had anything fur.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
As a librarian today, Betsy still feels protective over Anne.
Speaker 8 (39:13):
The fact of the matter is that if you're a critic,
it's very easy for people not to like you. But
if you're a critic, you are trying to separate the
wheat from the chaff. As a librarian, my job is
to find the best of the best of the best
and to hand them over and to make kids fall
in love with reading. And you cannot get kids to
fall in love with reading if you're giving them schlock
(39:34):
or I'm sorry, truck. These days, our job is very different.
We still are looking for the best, but we have
so many books to look through, which is wonderful. But
we also have so many voices we can like listen
to and hear and read through.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Betsy likens the root of children's librarianship to quote windows
and mirrors. If you just read books all about yourself,
you're looking into a mirror. However, when you read about
the world.
Speaker 8 (40:03):
It's like a window you can see the experience of
other people.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Margaret's books were certainly a window into another world, another
way of being.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
After working with Margaret's papers and letters and diaries all
these years, something that has really touched me is to
understand how to live true to yourself. And it was
a journey for her to fight against the system to
be true to her own sexuality at that time. I
(40:36):
can only look at her at the time and just
say I think she did the best she could with
what she had at the time, and she brought so
many people along the path with her, and she fought
for her own self in terms of business in a
way that a lot of people didn't have the guts
to do.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Margaret died young. She was just forty two. It was
recovering from an emergency surgery. A nurse asked Margaret how
she was feeling. Margaret high kicked her leg up to
show the nurse she was feeling great. That sudden movement
dislodged a blood clot in her leg. She died shortly after.
(41:19):
Twenty years after her death, in nineteen seventy two, the
New York Public Library added Good Night Moon to its shelves.
By that time, the world of children's literature had caught
up to Margaret. The shelves were now stocked full with
follow along books that depicted the world from a five
year old's eyes, Goodnight Moon was now the classic. Although
sales had dipped in the years just before Margaret's death,
(41:43):
After she passed, the sales numbers slowly began climbing. Amy
Gary has a theory as to why.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
There are many reasons I think Goodnight Moon has touched
so many people. One is it did hit at the
absolute right time.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
As we've noted, Margaret public plish Goodnight Moon in nineteen
forty seven, she was just in time for the biggest
baby boom America had ever known. They named the Whole
Generation after that explosion of infants.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Babies were being born, parents were reading it. But more
than that, she wanted there to be an interactive element
to it. So you have the interactivity of the parent
and the child finding the mouse together. So it's not
just a story that's being read to the child. It's
a moment together for the parent and child to share.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Good Night, little house and.
Speaker 8 (42:32):
Good night mouse.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
This unassuming little book, red and yellow and Green started
making its way through households, appearing in bedrooms and classrooms.
Typically it was read aloud.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Good night comb and good night brush.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Sales kept climbing, fifteen hundred copies in nineteen fifty three,
twenty thousand copies in nineteen seventy, more than four million
copies by nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
So you're passing this on generation to generation. It just
builds and builds and builds over generations. So they want
that experience with their own child as they grow up,
and it just continues to magnify and magnifon.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Turns out, Margaret was on to something with her quote
strange way of writing. Her words left an indelible mark
on the whole industry of children's literature, precisely because of
how nonsensical her words sounded.
Speaker 7 (43:28):
Good Night nobody, good night mush.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Even if a certain librarian saw her new style in
writing philosophy as mere.
Speaker 7 (43:36):
Truck and good night to the old lady whispering hush.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Margaret brought a child's world to the page, and in
doing so, she did indeed revolutionize children's literature.
Speaker 7 (43:48):
Good Night stars, good night air, good night noises everywhere.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
So it might be a challenge to try to adapt
good Night Moon the book for the big screen. I
think HBO something in the nineties to go back and
check that out. But Saren, if you were in charge
of casting the podcast about the book, yes, it was
in the story. Well you know, I like you.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
I love a story of two people fighting against each
other to do what they truly believe is a good thing.
Like that's the recipe for great drama. So like, I
was so into the casting for this one. For Margaret
wise Brown, I thought Emma Stone because she can do
that poetic, quirky in her sleep, right, So I think
you have her play Margaret wise Brown. And then for
her not stone cold rival, but her rival, and Carol Moore,
(44:39):
you go with another Ann and Halfaway because people seem
to love to see her as a villain. So I
was like, I can see her playing a librarian. I mean,
can't you see a full grown Ann Hathaway playing with
her a little wooden Dutch doll named Nicholas. I mean,
I'm in that moment, right. And then and for Lucy Mitchell,
the California educator with the here and now philosophy, I
was thinking, mix it up Selena Gomez. She'd be fun.
She seems literary. Boom, there you go, you got a
(45:02):
hit movie.
Speaker 5 (45:02):
I love this.
Speaker 6 (45:03):
I love a literary thriller. It's kind of my favorite
genre of movie. And also, did you look up actual
pictures of Margaret wise Brown because she was a babe?
Speaker 7 (45:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, that's yeah. I was trying like not to say
that exactly what happened.
Speaker 6 (45:17):
I'll say it, she objectively is a baby.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
I had to consider it in my casting.
Speaker 5 (45:22):
There's one other character that didn't play a big role
in the episode, but his name is Albert Clark, and
he's the one who has willed the copyright. You know,
he inherits the good Night Moon Fortune, even though he's
just a neighbor of Margaret wise Brown. I think the
kid from adolescence could play young Albert Clark. Good call,
(45:42):
let's get him in there. Yes, a little bit of
a tragic story for Albert Clark. The New Republic ran
a story in twenty twenty one and talked about how
when he turned twenty one he got the rights. Now,
the book wasn't a huge success at Margaret wise Brown's death,
so I don't think anyone was expecting this would just
be throwing off millions of dollars for his whole life.
(46:05):
Some run ins with the law, oh wow. But he
lived until eight seventy four, died in twenty eighteen, and
now his four children are the copyright holders. What the
right term is they are getting the money When my
grandma buys a book from Hallmark and records herself.
Speaker 6 (46:23):
That's amazing.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
What a lucky turn.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Seriously, do we know any reason why he was the
benefactor for her wealth? Did he like play some role
in her life? Was he like just the cool kids
she loved seeing play?
Speaker 6 (46:35):
According from Wikipedia, neighbors, Yeah, neighbors.
Speaker 5 (46:39):
The fact checker had some good notes about what we
could and couldn't say, just some speculation, and so the
son of a neighbor friend, I guess, is where we're
gonna go.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Okay, I think it's sweet, totally sweet, strange turn of events,
but totally sweet. Also, by the way, did you guys
I don't know, but if this one struck you, but
the Ann's portmanteau of truck, I'm going to use it.
I love the idea of something that is both a
toy and a book. And as I got to dismissive
derogatory term, I'm totally putting that one in the act.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
It's a truck.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5 (47:10):
Those baby books that Dana is sick of truck.
Speaker 6 (47:13):
Yeah, but at least Good Night Moon has this like
weird echoey liminal quality too it that I find kind
of entrancing.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Totally. No, I'm so kind of surprised at the book publishing.
It took him so long to get to the here
and now philosophy. Were they allergic to making money? It's
so obviously like this is like the future of children's literature,
and they're just like no dragons.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Today's episode was written by Carmen Borca Correo and edited
by Emily Rudder from the Wonder Media Network. Wonder is
a great partner of ours at Very Special Episodes. They
worked on the Andy the Sneaker Wearing Goose episode, which
was many people's favorite that we've done this year, and
they'll have more to come. Very Special Episodes is hosted
(47:58):
by Zaren Burnett, Danish Schwartz, and Jason English. Our producer
is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Chrischilds, Additional
editing by Mary Doo, mixing and mastering by Chris Childs,
fact checking by Maya Shukri. Thanks to our troop of
extraordinary voice actors Katie Maddie, Chrischilds, Josh Fisher, Jonathan Washington,
(48:22):
Charlotte English, and Juliette English. My middle daughter Kate is
ay at summer camp. She didn't get a chance to
read for the role. Original music by Elise McCoy, Show
logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
We are taking a break from publishing new episodes as
we work on our fall and winter slate. We've got
(48:42):
a lot of good stuff in the works. Maybe we'll
pop on and do a preview episode later this summer.
In the meantime, if you'd like to email the show,
you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail
dot com. Dana is the most famous Danish swartz on
TikTok and Instagram. Zaren is Zarin three on Twitter. I
just joined Instagram. I'm Jason English nine. Let's keep in
(49:03):
touch over the summer. Very Special Episodes is a production
of iHeart Podcasts.
In the Great Green Room, there was a telephone and
a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping
over the moon.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Those words have been spoken aloud at countless bedtimes. Parents
and children generations over can recite them from memory, but
few know who it was who committed those famous lines
to the page? Can you name the author of good
Night Moon?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I didn't even realize that Margaret was my favorite author
when I was a child.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
This is Amy Gary, author of in the Great Green Room.
The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret wise Brown.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
She did a lot of books that a lot of
people don't know she wrote. She's much more famous for
her works than for her name.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
In her lifetime, Margaret wise Brown published more than one
hundred books. The prolific author also wrote many many more
works that went unpublished for years. More than seventy of
Margaret's unpublished manuscripts sat hidden in a cedar trunk in Vermont.
The trunk was stored in the attic of her sister
Roberta's home.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
So I thought, oh my god, they've got to be ruined,
because the Vermont winners are brutal, and there's just no
way these papers would have survived.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Amy's concerns are born of experience. She was part of
a small publishing company. She knew books and how delicate
they can be. She first got to know Roberta thanks
to her efforts to reprint some of Margaret's older works.
They got to talking, and then a few months later
Amy found herself hunched over at her desk looking at
over five hundred pages of unpublished manuscripts.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
It was onion skin paper, which is this really really
thin paper, and they were stacked to end. This trunk
was full, completely in to end of things. Margaret had
left behind.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Books, music, poems, personal notes. The trunk held a veritable
treasure of all sorts of things Margaret Wise Brown set
down on paper, very very delicate paper. For more than
thirty years, Amy has published selections from the trunk of
treasures from Margaret's written life, and along the way, a
(02:31):
striking portrait of Margaret has emerged.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
She found joy where she could find joy, and she
lived hard. She lived well.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
I hope to write something serious one day, as soon
as I have something to say, But I am stuck
in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one
wants to move on.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Margaret Wise Brown was a rare one. She lived part
time on an island in Maine in an abandoned shack
with no running water or electricity. She blew royalty checks
on brand new Chryslers and transatlantic vacations. She died doing
a can can kick, and when she passed she left
her fortune to a nine year old neighbor. But none
of those anecdotes are the main course for today's episode.
(03:14):
Today's story is about her deceptively complex classic children's book
Goodnight Moon, because if the New York Public Library had
gotten its way, you would have never even heard of it.
This is Very Special Episodes, and I'm your host, Sarah
Burnett Today's episode Goodnight Moon.
Speaker 5 (03:41):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I'm Jason, She's Dana.
He's Zaren. Do you guys read Goodnight Moon as a kid. Oh?
Speaker 6 (03:48):
I loved Goodnight Moon.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Completely, big fan favorite in the Burnette household. Dana, do
you plan to read good Night Moon to you're young
and keep the tradition going?
Speaker 6 (03:56):
You know, we actually don't have it. I have a
seven month old baby. Is the shock update of this
episode of Very Special Episodes. And we have a lot
of kids books. We're in a big green Eggs and
ham fades. I'm also reading Chester's Way a lot, which
is very fun for me, but he is too young
to kind of even absorb it. Like there's baby books
(04:19):
for him those are so boring. So I'm just like
reading books for older kids to him that I kind
of enjoy it.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
Right seven months of the same baby.
Speaker 6 (04:27):
Book exactly, So I'm just like reading what I want.
I just ordered and this is exciting. King Big Goods
in the Bathtub, which I remember reading when I was
a kid. Stay tuned to see whether Arthur likes that one.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
My grandma Nana, she turned ninety four this week. She
got my kids a Hallmark version of good Night Moon
where she got to record herself narrating it and then
nailed it.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Oh.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
I don't know if Hallmark still has access to this technology,
but it was an incredible gift. She has a very nice,
soothing voice, so they probably for several years every night
I heard Nana reading Goodnight Moon to them, and she
added some like DVD commentary about what what else was
happening on the page and whatnot. It was delightful. So
(05:16):
I have a very positive association with the book. That's
such a good gifts like a good literary feud, especially
one that involves librarians. So this hits all the boxes
for me.
Speaker 6 (05:29):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Margaret wise Brown was born in Brooklyn in nineteen ten,
the middle child of three in a well to do family.
Her parents sent her off to attend boarding schools in
Switzerland and Massachusetts, and when she was home, she was
not expected to follow the traditional roles common for girls
of that age. Her father encouraged her to enjoy the outdoors,
(05:53):
to hunt and to fish. She was a talented beagler.
It's a type of small game hunting where the hunter
runs along alongside a pack of hunting dogs. Margaret had
no problem keeping up.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
She traveled extensively as a child. She knew what was interesting,
and she had kept diaries her whole life since childhood,
and she would just go back into her diaries, remind
herself of what she was feeling at different times throughout
her life, and draw on those emotions put something into writing.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
When Margaret was growing up, fairy tales were the preferred
stories her children. Princes, fairies, dragons, they were all the rage.
But when Margaret began to pen her own stories, they
focused on the real world of what was around her,
what she directly saw, felt, and smelled.
Speaker 7 (06:44):
A bug in a rug, a bug in the grass,
a bug on the sidewalk, a bug in a glass.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
After graduating from Holland's College in Virginia, she moved back
to New York. Margaret began submitting short fiction to magazines, unsuccessfully,
but her writing output in those days was prolific and unconventional.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Big as the whole world, deep as a giant.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Margaret seemed to love words above all else. She told
one professor she hated writing stories. Quote with plots.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Quiet is electricity rushing about the world.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I can read yet another little furry bunny doing something,
little furry animal doing something, and I come away amazed
at how perfect her poetry is.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Quiet as electricity, rushing about the world, quiet as mud.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
These are the sentences. Margaret treasured her prized audience, and
as far as she was concerned that the best authors
around were children, specifically five year olds. As she once
wrote in an.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Essay, all these are five year old similes. Let the
grown up writer for children equal or better them if
he can.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Margaret also tried to become a teacher, again unsuccessfully. She
wasn't great at leading a classroom, much like her writing.
She was a bit unfocused, much like her young students.
And then Margaret found a kindred soul.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Lucy Mitchell said, I may have created the here and
now philosophy, but Margaret gave it wings, and she did.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Lucy Sprague Mitchell was an educator who taught at Berkeley.
A woman dissatisfied with the gap between girls and boys education,
so she upended the educational system.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Prior to Margaret and her mentor's work on children's literature,
girls and boys had been educated separately. Girls had one
track of education, boys had another.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
In separate classrooms. Girls were taught simpler mathematics, less complex theories,
materials far different from what boys learned, which made it
impossible for girls to be on equal footing when they
were placed in a co ed course in college with boys.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
So Lucy Mitchell her mentor had been at the high
levels of education within the California system and realized you
had to take it all the way down to the
kindergarten level and start from there. So she brought in
all of these different methods from around the world to
help move education forward, hopefully making it as she called it,
(09:17):
democratic for boys and girls to be educated, not only
for girls to be educated equally, but for boys to
see the girls as equals. So one of the things
that they did was they wanted them to be able
to use the same language within literature.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
The Bank Street School theorized that in order for education
to really be quote equal, boys and girls needed to
be reading the same things, learning the same lessons, seeing
themselves through the same lenses.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
But if you took textbooks for literature and tried to
have it be taught in a classroom that were fairy
tales and fables, and you still had the trend of
girls looking for me mauraged to be their ultimate goal.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
The same books Margaret had grown up on were still
the ones she began to teach to her students. Well,
that wouldn't do for a revolutionary classroom in the nineteen thirties,
so she enrolled at Lucy's Bank Street Cooperative School for teachers,
and Margaret did what she did best, She wrote for children.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So she and Margaret began writing textbooks to forward stories
that used characters that they created. More than that, they
wanted to give children their own words back to them.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
The Bank Street school philosophy was based on the here
and now storybook, or what Lucy had dubbed here and Now.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
The here and now philosophy was, we're going to give
the child their own world back to them their own
here and now. It was a very unique way to
approach a child's world. We're not going to talk down
to the child. We're going to talk to the child.
We're going to talk to them at their level. Instead
of expecting them to be little adults, we're going to
(11:05):
talk to them as children, and we're going to give
them their world as they see it and let them
be who they are.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
If we are writing for these delights and interests of
five year olds, we must remember them and experience them
in our stories. And another thing, no matter how important
we know little kittens and steam engines to be to
a five year old, no one can ever write about
them without a real love for them and familiarity with
them in some form, actual or remembered.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
So they would have children write stories for the teachers,
and then they would take the stories look at the
words the children used around a particular event. They would
take that vocabulary and by age rank the words that
the children used and then use that list of vocabulary
(11:54):
to be able to write their stories for children.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
The educators quite literally let the children pick the words
for the adults to compose into sentences. The words were
ones that kids connected with, savored, and enjoyed. The children
would also become the words.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
And then they would also physically let the children become
different characters, like buzzing bees or pretend to be a dog.
Then they would note what the children did as that dog.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
They did the same with illustrations. They brought in artists
and let the kids be the judges of which pictures
spoke to them.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
And if it didn't ring true to the children, the
illustrators were sent back to try again, because sometimes it
didn't really look like a car to the children, or
it didn't really look like a dog to the children.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
This was key because the kids saw the world with
their tiny eyes of wonder. The educators wanted the adult
artists to do the same.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
She wanted true fine artists to learn how to illustrate
for children because they were to see the world differently
as well. How do you take something that is bold
and different and put it into something a child would see?
How do you have an illustrator, recreate sound through art,
have a jagged piece of art, illustrate what it is
(13:16):
she's trying to portray through her words.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
The educators also pulled from the emerging field of child
psychology to help craft their stories.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
They both were very much aware of how psychology played
into a child's mind at different ages. A really good
example of this is Runaway Bunny.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Around the age of two, a child begins to see
themselves as separate being from a parent.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
If you run away, said his mother, I will run
after you, for you are my little bunny.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
And it's scary. It's a very scary thing for the child.
They have this sort of love hate relationship with being
an independent being. So Margaret knew about this French love
song that she had heard when she was in boarding
school in Switzerland.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
The love song is the musical account of an unwelcome advance.
There's a relentless pursuer and a narrator who wants nothing
to do with them. Think if you pursue me, I'll
become a fish to escape you. If you become a fish,
I'll become an eel to hunt you down that kind
of thing.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
If you run after me, said the little bunny, I
will become a fish in a trout stream, and I
will swim away from you.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Margaret knew that sort of if you then I changing
method would really work in terms of the mother child relationship,
but doing it in terms of safety instead of threatening.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
If you become a fish in a trout stream, said
his mother, I will become a fisherman, and I will
fish for you.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Those kinds of psychological assurances worked really well for the
runaway bunny, and she knew it would because she understood
that psychology that plays well for that particular age. So
assurances giving back to the children what they heard, they saw,
they understood at those particular ages was crucial to helping
(15:16):
a child begin to understand their own world.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
The children were in charge. Margaret was simply a wordsmith.
She selected from the children's vocabulary, She borrowed from their
language of sights and sounds and smells, and then in
their rhythms, she transformed the children's words into poetry. She
was like a dj of syllables and phonetic phrases that
delight children. Ever, the child herself, Margaret was very good
(15:43):
at it.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
She knew how to comfort a child because she had
sought some of that comfort on her own as a child.
She knew what she needed as a child and remembered
what she needed.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Shucks, said the bunny. I might just as well stay
where I am and be your little bunny. And so
he did have a carrot, said the mother bunny.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Margaret's world of bunnies and bugs and of curious eyes
peering through bushes resonated with children, and it was profitable too.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
As the popularity of the here and now philosophy grew
in terms of the publications being bought and other publishers
adopting this idea that yes, we can publish directly to
the marketplace and not just take fairy tales and fables
and redo them. And it was the wild West of
(16:33):
children's publishing, and it was a lot of arguments within
the publishing world itself.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Margaret wasn't just satisfied with revolutionizing children's books. She wanted everything,
every part of the publishing process to become better.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
We're going to now have golden books sold at pennies
instead of dollars, and everybody can have books in their homes.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Little Golden Books. The publisher for many of Margaret's works
specialized in those durable, hardcover, brightly colorful, and importantly affordable
children's books. Usually the publisher printed in both color and
black and white to save on printing costs. The low
cost books were successful, but they also lowered the esteem
for the writers and illustrators who worked with the publisher.
(17:21):
Other book companies came to the conclusion that.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
If they worked for Golden Books, they were going to
be doing cheap books. And Margaret went on a stump
tour of publishing panels and just said, there is no
such thing as cheap books. If you have good writing
and good illustrations, that's quality. With Golden Books, we are
(17:46):
giving them just some of the best stuff that's out there. Yes,
it might be priced more cheaply, but the quality is there.
And you know what, those same books are still on
the racks today.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Margaret also did the same sort of goodwill tour for illustrators.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
She worked very closely with her illustrators, which we do
not do in publishing anymore. You have an illustrator over
here and an author over here, and near the two
shell meet. But she invited her illustrators to come and
work and collaborate with her, because they really were defining
a whole new way to make books for children. Very interactive.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
As a businesswoman, she made the books she wanted to
read and to look at.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
At the time she started working, illustrators were paid nothing,
and she realized that if she were to keep these
illustrators that she loved working for her, they had to
make as much as she made. And so she went
to her publishers and said pay them more, and they said, nope,
we're not going to do it. She said, well, then
(18:47):
split my royalties with them. She demanded that her publishers,
if they're not going to use something, she wanted her
rights back, and she also fought to keep rights that
they weren't going to use. All of the ructures that
she created we still use in publishing today. Every single
royalty structure she created is still in place.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Once Margaret's books were in wide circulation and readers loved them,
that's when the publishers who'd previously turned up their noses
at Lucy's Here and now approached to Kitty Litt were
suddenly lining up to knock on her door. According to Amy,
at one point, demand for Margaret's books was so strong
she was writing for six different publishers under different pen names.
(19:33):
She was also working across genres. Margaret wrote children's books,
but she also penned adult poems, she wrote music, and
she was even beginning to branch out to TV and
to radio.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I have mad respect for this woman. Her telegrams to
her publishers were things like I better not see you
on the streets of Paris, or I'm going to shoot
you with my bow and arrow. So was she did
it with such grace and he ilarity that they couldn't
really be mad at her. And she was right, darn it,
she was right.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Despite becoming an adult author and successful children's lit author,
Margaret still hadn't really grown up. Ever, the big kid
success certainly didn't spoil her. She remained a true eccentric character.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Margaret was always with the dog in tow if she
could be. When she was in New York City. He
was known to peddle on people at bus stops and
pretty much get up to no good anytime he was
with her.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Allegedly, one time, Margaret tried to leave her dog in
her convertible. The dog wasn't into that idea. So she
tied his leash to the steering wheel and she went
about her business.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
In no time he was you know, I think he
pulled the steering wheel off the car with his leash
and was running down the street or something.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
After that, she came to the only reasonable conclusion. She
decided it was best if she kept her dog with
her wherever she went. One day, Margaret, she showed up
to a business meeting with her agent.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
And she was carrying these two ice cream cones with her,
and she thought, oh, how lovely Margaret's brought us ice cream.
And Margaret's down and begins to give the dog ice
cream cones, not the staff, but the dog, so that
she could have her meetings with her dog in tow.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Margaret's life was entirely her own. Basically, she lived a
sort of life she'd want to write about. There wasn't
much daylight between the quirky stories she wrote and the
days she lived and enjoyed to their fullest. In her thirties,
Margaret moved into a small apartment in Manhattan. But it
was not what you may be picturing. It wasn't a
(21:40):
tall building. In fact, it was another shack. It was
a small white clapboard shack low to the ground in
Greenwich Village.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
It was a little house in the middle of a
big city, and nobody knew it was there.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
She'd go on to write some of her most beloved
works in and about her secret big city shack. She
wrote about her home in a book, The Hidden House.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
It had been there for years and years, for over
one hundred years, forgotten, and there it stood, in a
hidden garden in the middle of the big block of skyscrapers.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
At her studio Cobble Court, named after the cobblestone streets
that surrounded her hidden house. Margaret continued to compose poetry
and literature according to the philosophy of here and.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
Now the Great Green Room.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Perhaps she never fully realized how consequential those everyday settings
and mundane objects would become.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
There was a telephone, but.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
She saw the world with a child's eyes, the kind
that can enliven anything, even the most mundane, like wallpaper.
One time, Margaret grew enamored with the bold colors of
a neighbor's apartment.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
She wanted it to feel like you were walking into
a Spanish painting. And she's seen this apartment with the
bold red, bold green, bold yellow, and she wanted to
recreate that in the book, or she.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Could find a world in the nooks and crannies of
her studio.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
And a young mouse, and so the mouse that was
in the hall, which I think she really did have
a mouse in that little tiny apartment of hers. That
it is based on physically is it is cobblecorp.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Margaret also recalled the nighttime spent in her childhood bedroom
calling out to the moon with her sister.
Speaker 7 (23:25):
ROBERTA good night room, good night moon, good night cow,
jumping over the moon, good night light in the red balloon.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
The actual idea from Goodnight Moon came from her childhood
with her sister. She and her sister would say good
night to all the things in the room as they
were going to bed.
Speaker 7 (23:44):
Good Night bears, goodnight chairs.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Can you picture the room from the book. There's the
three bright walls, nearly askew, nestled against the far wall.
There's a crackling fireplace, tucked safe and cozy inside the
sheets of the big red bed. There's a little bunny
and peering in through the windows, surrounded by a starry night.
Is a bright white full moon when it came out
(24:13):
in nineteen forty seven. Good Night Moon won praise from
The New York Times, The Paper of Record highlighted the
book's rhythms and it's now iconic illustrations, which certainly expressed
the philosophy of here and now.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
And she was also publishing a lot of discussions about
whether or not she should blend fantasy into reality. Margaret
wanted every child to see themselves within a story by
placing animals as the protagonist. So as you notice in
Goodnight Moon there's a bunny in that bed. It's not
(24:47):
a child, it's a bunny. So every child can see
themselves as that bunny. Doesn't matter, gender, doesn't matter, race.
And at some point they actually thought about making the
old lady human and instead made her bunny because that
would have broken that wall of fantasy of the bunny.
And then do you clothe the animals? Do you not?
(25:10):
I mean, like, where do you blend that reality and fantasy.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
While Margaret was successfully reimagining the style and the philosophy
of books for kids, not everyone loved her big new
ideas for how to change children's literature. Remember how we
said the New York Public Library would get involved in
all this, stay tuned for the lions about to roar.
Speaker 8 (25:40):
Let's just be frank about it. Goodnight Moon is a
weird book. The color scheme is weird. There's a tiger's
skin on the ground. Bunnies shoot tigers. Sure everyone is
bunny's for some reason.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
That's Betsy Bird. Now, Betsy wasn't there to bad mouth
good Night Moon back in nineteen forty seven. But she
is a librarian and formerly with the New York Public Library,
which is how she knows so much about one certain
librarian who did sharpen her knives for good Night Moon.
Speaker 8 (26:11):
There's certainly no plot, and then it kind of goes,
heywhy where it's like good night nobody? Like what are
we saying good night to the void?
Speaker 6 (26:18):
You know?
Speaker 8 (26:19):
Any way you slice it, this was a strange book.
Anne Carroll Moore did not approve of it for Newer
Public Library, which meant it didn't get added to near
Public Library.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
And Carol Moore in many many of the stories you
may read or hear about Margaret wise Brown, this librarian
comes off as the villain. And Carol Moore, she'd been
head of the New York Public Library's Children's section by
nineteen forty seven, she was working in a consulting role.
Speaker 8 (26:49):
So Anne Carroll Moore was, as I say, pretty much
what you kind of picture when you picture a library.
If you look at photographs of her, she's very stately,
you know, good straight back on her.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Take your expectations for a stern, no nonsense librarian, and
then crank it up to ten and then past ten
up to eleven. She was that extra. Even though people
liked to portray Anne and Margaret as diametric opposites, both
women were equally eccentric.
Speaker 8 (27:17):
She had a little wooden Dutch doll named Nicholas, whom
she would speak to on a regular basis. It was
probably seen as a little weird then, it's certainly seen
as a little weird now. So people would make tiny
things for Nicholas, and she would keep them in a
large case. There was a tiny faberget egg from a
former Russian countess I believe, who had escaped the country
(27:42):
prior to the revolution, and so just imagine like the
world's tiniest faberge egg.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Despite her tiny wooden Dutch doll, Nicholas, or the tiniest
faberget egg, and her sordid treasure trove of oddities and gifts,
and Carol Moore held enormous influence in the book world,
and not just over libraries, but over books all over
the country. Her name was synonymous with children's literature.
Speaker 8 (28:08):
And Carroll Moore was completely known by everyone everywhere. She
was the person who started children's services at near public library,
and she had had huge sway over not just children's
book collections in New York, but all over the country
thanks to her newsletters and her choices and her best
of books of the yearless so when I came in,
(28:30):
her name was synonymous with what it meant to be
a children's librarian and the name.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
To know and children's lit Because before and Carol Moore,
children's literature didn't exist, not really, not in the way
we might think of it.
Speaker 8 (28:45):
So to really understand how important Ann Carroll Moore was,
you kind of have to understand what the state of
children's book publishing was at that time. If you wanted
a children's book, the bookstores there were mostly favored adult books,
and so you'd probably have to go to the library.
The librarians had more sway over the children's book industry
than anyone else. Ann Carl Moore sort of led the
(29:07):
charge at New York Public Library, and all children's authors, illustrators,
and even editors would come to her. They wanted her
stamp of approval. What she approved, librarians around the country
would purchase.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Ann's power was so great she held sway over bookstores
and libraries all across the country. She was also involved
in the creation of the Newberry and the Caldecott Awards,
which are today two of the most prestigious awards in
children's literature.
Speaker 8 (29:36):
And as a result, you know, it very much depended
on what she saw was good and what was bad.
And what she thought was bad were things that she
called truck.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Not like what you might drive. Truck was Anne's portmanteau
for books she saw as part toy and part book,
and worthless as both.
Speaker 8 (29:53):
Truck was no good, So books that seemed like toys
like Pat the Bunny Truck series, like Nancy Drew Truck,
Let's see the comics. Oh do I even have to
say it? Truck truck Truck. She really wanted kids books
to be seen as their own legitimate literature form, and
she was hugely influential in getting people to believe that.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Anne's mission doesn't sound particularly villainous. She wanted to provide
the children of America with good, clean books, stories written
for kids, and being a traditionalist, naturally, she preferred fairy tales.
Speaker 8 (30:28):
This is why if you go into many an older
children's room, you'll find a huge fairy tale folk tale
collections section. That's because that's what librarians wanted.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Fairy tales and folk tales, the exact same stories. Margaret
grew up reading the exact same stories that made her
want to go full on Bank Street School and revolutionized
children's lit. But her rival, Anne Carol Moore disagreed on
philosophical grounds. She believed the only good books were the
fantasies because that's what Anne Carrol Moore liked.
Speaker 8 (31:02):
She felt that children lived in sort of a magical
time and there was this certain kind of book that
suited them better. She liked fantasy quite a lot. She
was not as big a fan of realism, and she
certainly wasn't a fan of when realism and fantasy intertwined.
This is kind of one of the reasons she clashed
(31:24):
with new thinkings about childhood that came out of places
like the Bank Street School of Education, and of course
who came out of the Bank Street School of Education,
Margaret wise Brown.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Anne opposed everything Margaret stood for, all the thoughts she'd
put into how to best blend the real world with
the fantastic, the time she spent learning how to play
with anomanopea the way children do, to make her words
sing like poetry and sound like childhood, no matter to
her the stern head librarian and Carol Moore, she wasn't listening.
Speaker 8 (31:55):
So the Bank Street College of Education, they had a
very specific way of teaching their educators. You see how
kids see things, you think how kids think, and you
don't disparage it in any way. So it's funny that
Anne Carroll Moore was trying to get a form of
legitimacy for literature for the actual kids themselves. She was
(32:19):
not interested in the psychology of the child. She was
interested in giving them the best books, which she would
determine because she was an adult, and quite frankly, if
you let kids choose, they'd choose something she didn't approve of.
So this was almost a philosophical difference that they had
with one another. But for Ann Carroll Moore, children's books
(32:41):
had a very specific role that they were supposed to fit,
and anything that didn't fit into that role was seen
as other and therefore suspicious and maybe not as good
as kids deserved.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Nineteen forty seven, Good Night Moon was published. That meant
the two rivals were guaranteed a face off because Margaret
had to make the pilgrimage to the New York Public
Library to make her case before Anne Carroll Moore.
Speaker 8 (33:08):
And like everyone else, Margaret wise Brown had to make
that trip and try to sell her very unique style
to Anne Carroll Moore. And Ann Carroll Moore, you cannot
say she never added a Margaret wise Brown book to
her shelf. She did, but she didn't add them all.
So there were certain titles she didn't add, and one
(33:29):
of them was, without a doubt, Good Night Moon.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
What was the result of her pilgrimage to the New
York Public Library A clear, resounding, and now legendary no.
Ann Carroll Moore ruled that the New York Public Library
would not carry Good Night Moon. Looking back, we can't
know what was going through Anne's mind when she made
that decision, but thanks to those long forgotten papers from
(33:54):
a cedar chest, Betsy Bird does have an idea or
two about why this the book was rejected and not
others from Margaret Wise.
Speaker 8 (34:03):
Brown Bunnies had worked with Runaway Bunny, though these bunnies
were wearing clothes and had telephones and owned cats. Let's
just think about that. So, like I say, there's a
level of weird internal logic going on there. Andermore did
not deal well with weird internal logic.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
There were other classics and Carol Moore barred from the
library shelves. Charlotte's Webb and Stuart Little come to mind.
They were on Anne's no Library list to give you
a better idea of what classics she would call truck
But in the case of good Night Moon.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
And Carroll Moore came out very much against all of
the here and now books.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Here's Amy Gary with Margaret's side of the story.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
There are many letters back and forth between Margaret and
Bill Scott, the publisher, about what they're going to do
about the fact that New York Public Library, a very
prominent stalwart in terms of library and content, would not
carry the books or review them. And it was frustrating
for them because it was just a hard line in
(35:08):
the sand against what they were doing.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yes, this major librarian's book review and support would boost
her new book's popularity. But Margaret was also a well
established author. She and the publishers had other ways to
get reviews, mainly through newspapers.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
However, it's still felt like a very personal slight to her.
There are letters from where she is written to Ursula.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
That's Ursula Nordstrom, who's a well known children's book.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Editor, about how it hurt to be treated so poorly
by Anne Carol Moore. And I hurt for her because
she wanted that acceptance as a writer of not children's books,
but children's literature. And I will say, you know, she
may have lost the battle, but she sure as heck
won the war.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Looking at Margaret and and here were two brilliant women
entirely dedicated to their shared goal to legitimize and advance
the promise of children's literature. Just like Margaret wise Brown
and Carol Moore wanted to give children their own literature
because she also cared about kids. And keep in mind,
this was at a time when having a childhood like
(36:27):
we know it was a luxury and not common.
Speaker 8 (36:31):
This is not long after a time when children simply
were not even allowed in libraries, the idea of creating
a space for them was still relatively new, because children
were grimy, disgusting many adults and did not deserve their
own space. I mean, half the time if the kid
was working class a had coal dust on their hands.
(36:51):
She was someone who truly believed that children not only
belonged in the library, but they deserved to have really
good books for themselves in the library.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Perhaps even more radically, and believed all children should have
access to stories. While Margaret wanted to make education between
boys and girls more egalitarian and knew that opening a
children's library in New York City meant opening a new
library in one of the most diverse cities in the world,
and she intended to reflect that diversity in the shelves
(37:23):
of the children's library.
Speaker 8 (37:24):
She wasn't just saying white, rich kids need to be
in the library. She literally wanted every single child in
the library. Under her watch and the watch of her successors,
that system was set up with the understanding that all
children belonged in the library. And then, of course, yes,
she was buying books from around the world, which quite
(37:46):
frankly is difficult to do today, and then they had
to be good books. So she would find the best
books in other languages for kids and put them in
the library for them specifically. So this is what she
believed a library was and could do.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
To be clear, many of these books, while they may
have been in a different language, were intended to help
immigrant children assimilate and to quote, become more American. Still,
what Anne believed in was quality literature for children, just
like Margaret did. They wanted kids to read things that mattered.
Where they didn't quite see eye to eye was the
(38:23):
question of what mattered.
Speaker 8 (38:25):
It is so easy to be on the side of
Margaret wise Brown. She's more fun than Anne Carroll Moore,
and Carroll Moore is literally the librarian that shoushes you.
Margaret wise Brown died because she did the can can
for fun in her hospital bed. I mean literally, they
could not be more diametrically opposed in so many ways.
(38:47):
So I have a lot of sympathy as a result
for what I consider to be the underdog in this story,
and that's Anne Carroll Moore and Carrol Moore did not
destroy Margaret wise Brown's career, and in fact, possibly we
kept some of her lesser good books out of the
library I don't think she deeply loathed Margaret wise Brown.
I just don't think she had anything fur.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
As a librarian today, Betsy still feels protective over Anne.
Speaker 8 (39:13):
The fact of the matter is that if you're a critic,
it's very easy for people not to like you. But
if you're a critic, you are trying to separate the
wheat from the chaff. As a librarian, my job is
to find the best of the best of the best
and to hand them over and to make kids fall
in love with reading. And you cannot get kids to
fall in love with reading if you're giving them schlock
(39:34):
or I'm sorry, truck. These days, our job is very different.
We still are looking for the best, but we have
so many books to look through, which is wonderful. But
we also have so many voices we can like listen
to and hear and read through.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Betsy likens the root of children's librarianship to quote windows
and mirrors. If you just read books all about yourself,
you're looking into a mirror. However, when you read about
the world.
Speaker 8 (40:03):
It's like a window you can see the experience of
other people.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Margaret's books were certainly a window into another world, another
way of being.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
After working with Margaret's papers and letters and diaries all
these years, something that has really touched me is to
understand how to live true to yourself. And it was
a journey for her to fight against the system to
be true to her own sexuality at that time. I
(40:36):
can only look at her at the time and just
say I think she did the best she could with
what she had at the time, and she brought so
many people along the path with her, and she fought
for her own self in terms of business in a
way that a lot of people didn't have the guts
to do.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Margaret died young. She was just forty two. It was
recovering from an emergency surgery. A nurse asked Margaret how
she was feeling. Margaret high kicked her leg up to
show the nurse she was feeling great. That sudden movement
dislodged a blood clot in her leg. She died shortly after.
(41:19):
Twenty years after her death, in nineteen seventy two, the
New York Public Library added Good Night Moon to its shelves.
By that time, the world of children's literature had caught
up to Margaret. The shelves were now stocked full with
follow along books that depicted the world from a five
year old's eyes, Goodnight Moon was now the classic. Although
sales had dipped in the years just before Margaret's death,
(41:43):
After she passed, the sales numbers slowly began climbing. Amy
Gary has a theory as to why.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
There are many reasons I think Goodnight Moon has touched
so many people. One is it did hit at the
absolute right time.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
As we've noted, Margaret public plish Goodnight Moon in nineteen
forty seven, she was just in time for the biggest
baby boom America had ever known. They named the Whole
Generation after that explosion of infants.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Babies were being born, parents were reading it. But more
than that, she wanted there to be an interactive element
to it. So you have the interactivity of the parent
and the child finding the mouse together. So it's not
just a story that's being read to the child. It's
a moment together for the parent and child to share.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Good Night, little house and.
Speaker 8 (42:32):
Good night mouse.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
This unassuming little book, red and yellow and Green started
making its way through households, appearing in bedrooms and classrooms.
Typically it was read aloud.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Good night comb and good night brush.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Sales kept climbing, fifteen hundred copies in nineteen fifty three,
twenty thousand copies in nineteen seventy, more than four million
copies by nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
So you're passing this on generation to generation. It just
builds and builds and builds over generations. So they want
that experience with their own child as they grow up,
and it just continues to magnify and magnifon.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Turns out, Margaret was on to something with her quote
strange way of writing. Her words left an indelible mark
on the whole industry of children's literature, precisely because of
how nonsensical her words sounded.
Speaker 7 (43:28):
Good Night nobody, good night mush.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Even if a certain librarian saw her new style in
writing philosophy as mere.
Speaker 7 (43:36):
Truck and good night to the old lady whispering hush.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Margaret brought a child's world to the page, and in
doing so, she did indeed revolutionize children's literature.
Speaker 7 (43:48):
Good Night stars, good night air, good night noises everywhere.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
So it might be a challenge to try to adapt
good Night Moon the book for the big screen. I
think HBO something in the nineties to go back and
check that out. But Saren, if you were in charge
of casting the podcast about the book, yes, it was
in the story. Well you know, I like you.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
I love a story of two people fighting against each
other to do what they truly believe is a good thing.
Like that's the recipe for great drama. So like, I
was so into the casting for this one. For Margaret
wise Brown, I thought Emma Stone because she can do
that poetic, quirky in her sleep, right, So I think
you have her play Margaret wise Brown. And then for
her not stone cold rival, but her rival, and Carol Moore,
(44:39):
you go with another Ann and Halfaway because people seem
to love to see her as a villain. So I
was like, I can see her playing a librarian. I mean,
can't you see a full grown Ann Hathaway playing with
her a little wooden Dutch doll named Nicholas. I mean,
I'm in that moment, right. And then and for Lucy Mitchell,
the California educator with the here and now philosophy, I
was thinking, mix it up Selena Gomez. She'd be fun.
She seems literary. Boom, there you go, you got a
(45:02):
hit movie.
Speaker 5 (45:02):
I love this.
Speaker 6 (45:03):
I love a literary thriller. It's kind of my favorite
genre of movie. And also, did you look up actual
pictures of Margaret wise Brown because she was a babe?
Speaker 7 (45:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, that's yeah. I was trying like not to say
that exactly what happened.
Speaker 6 (45:17):
I'll say it, she objectively is a baby.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
I had to consider it in my casting.
Speaker 5 (45:22):
There's one other character that didn't play a big role
in the episode, but his name is Albert Clark, and
he's the one who has willed the copyright. You know,
he inherits the good Night Moon Fortune, even though he's
just a neighbor of Margaret wise Brown. I think the
kid from adolescence could play young Albert Clark. Good call,
(45:42):
let's get him in there. Yes, a little bit of
a tragic story for Albert Clark. The New Republic ran
a story in twenty twenty one and talked about how
when he turned twenty one he got the rights. Now,
the book wasn't a huge success at Margaret wise Brown's death,
so I don't think anyone was expecting this would just
be throwing off millions of dollars for his whole life.
(46:05):
Some run ins with the law, oh wow. But he
lived until eight seventy four, died in twenty eighteen, and
now his four children are the copyright holders. What the
right term is they are getting the money When my
grandma buys a book from Hallmark and records herself.
Speaker 6 (46:23):
That's amazing.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
What a lucky turn.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Seriously, do we know any reason why he was the
benefactor for her wealth? Did he like play some role
in her life? Was he like just the cool kids
she loved seeing play?
Speaker 6 (46:35):
According from Wikipedia, neighbors, Yeah, neighbors.
Speaker 5 (46:39):
The fact checker had some good notes about what we
could and couldn't say, just some speculation, and so the
son of a neighbor friend, I guess, is where we're
gonna go.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Okay, I think it's sweet, totally sweet, strange turn of events,
but totally sweet. Also, by the way, did you guys
I don't know, but if this one struck you, but
the Ann's portmanteau of truck, I'm going to use it.
I love the idea of something that is both a
toy and a book. And as I got to dismissive
derogatory term, I'm totally putting that one in the act.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
It's a truck.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5 (47:10):
Those baby books that Dana is sick of truck.
Speaker 6 (47:13):
Yeah, but at least Good Night Moon has this like
weird echoey liminal quality too it that I find kind
of entrancing.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Totally. No, I'm so kind of surprised at the book publishing.
It took him so long to get to the here
and now philosophy. Were they allergic to making money? It's
so obviously like this is like the future of children's literature,
and they're just like no dragons.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Today's episode was written by Carmen Borca Correo and edited
by Emily Rudder from the Wonder Media Network. Wonder is
a great partner of ours at Very Special Episodes. They
worked on the Andy the Sneaker Wearing Goose episode, which
was many people's favorite that we've done this year, and
they'll have more to come. Very Special Episodes is hosted
(47:58):
by Zaren Burnett, Danish Schwartz, and Jason English. Our producer
is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Chrischilds, Additional
editing by Mary Doo, mixing and mastering by Chris Childs,
fact checking by Maya Shukri. Thanks to our troop of
extraordinary voice actors Katie Maddie, Chrischilds, Josh Fisher, Jonathan Washington,
(48:22):
Charlotte English, and Juliette English. My middle daughter Kate is
ay at summer camp. She didn't get a chance to
read for the role. Original music by Elise McCoy, Show
logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
We are taking a break from publishing new episodes as
we work on our fall and winter slate. We've got
(48:42):
a lot of good stuff in the works. Maybe we'll
pop on and do a preview episode later this summer.
In the meantime, if you'd like to email the show,
you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail
dot com. Dana is the most famous Danish swartz on
TikTok and Instagram. Zaren is Zarin three on Twitter. I
just joined Instagram. I'm Jason English nine. Let's keep in
(49:03):
touch over the summer. Very Special Episodes is a production
of iHeart Podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.