In the Great Green Room

Tom Lehrer, a satirical songwriter and comedian, once observed, "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead ten years." One gets somewhat the same feeling reading the biography of Margaret Wise Brown. She died at age 42 from an embolism that developed following some routine surgery, and each of the years from her mid-twenties until her death was filled with books she wrote and illustrators she worked with, all in a manner that appears utterly natural and effortless. In the chronicle of her life, a year seems like forever since so much is happening to her month by month. The compression is like her work itself. She is a miniaturist who pays at once playful and serious attention to the details that occupy the mind of a small child, able to create a sense of space that is both large and small: "In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon / And a picture of—/ The cow jumping over the moon / And there were three little bears sitting on chairs / And two little kittens / And a pair of mittens. . ." (Goodnight Moon).

She came of age into a world that was ready for her talents, and she found the people who would help her shape them—first the founder of the Bank Street School, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, later adventurous and sure-footed editors like Ursula Nordstrom, and, one after the other, illustrators whose sensibilities were congenial with her own. Marcus writes that she was "one of the central figures of a period now considered the golden age of the American picture book, the years spanning the post-Depression thirties and the postwar baby boom forties and fifties" (1). In 15 prolific years, she wrote close to 200 children's books.

Born in 1910, Brown lived a privileged but somewhat lonely childhood. Her paternal grandfather, B. Gratz Brown, had been both a senator and governor of Missouri, and an unsuccessful running mate for the U.S. presidency with Horace Greeley. Brown's father, who did not inherit his own father's progressive spirit, became a prosperous, conservative, and sometimes tyrannical businessman. Her mother, a college-educated woman with early aspirations to be an actress, decided instead on marriage and the pastimes appropriate to that role. Their relationship, Marcus says, began to "unravel" by the time Margaret was in her teens, and there was a good deal of traveling in Margaret's childhood which undermined her ability to maintain friendships with peers. Brown's older brother and younger sister chose conventional careers and marriage in due time. But Brown was uncertain of where she was going. An uneven student, she didn't really find her way until she discovered Bank Street, the progressive nursery school and training ground for teachers in Greenwich Village, that was being overseen with enormous vision and energy by Lucy Sprague Mitchell.

Mitchell, another woman of privilege, whose father did not so much as let her draw as a child, was convinced of the importance of paying attention to what sort of people children really were and what their needs were, of entering their world. She was committed to documenting her findings, and to shaping education around the "here and now" of the child's experiences. Marcus devotes spacious attention to describing the ambience and activity of Bank Street, and to explaining its theoretical foundations in the works of William James, Edward Thorndike, and John Dewey. Mitchell's school fostered a "curriculum of experience," an emphasis on "relationship thinking," and a collaborative atmosphere in which teachers were encouraged to observe and record children's speech and activity.

One of Mitchell's many projects was to write stories for children based on their concrete observations of the world. She called them "here-and-now" books, and it is by putting herself to this task that Margaret Wise Brown began her meticulous writing for children. Brown realized early that she didn't want to be a teacher, but she loved creating children's stories...