Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by You Know Who

One purpose of literary biography is to send the reader with quickened interest in pursuit of the life and works of its subject. Leonard S. Marcus's biography of the complex and endlessly engaging author Margaret Wise Brown, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, not only meets this mark but also heralds a literary event in children's literature and literature by women. As in running to hounds—a sport of which Margaret Wise Brown was very fond—such a work can afford the reader a good hunt even if the rabbit escapes.

Physicists and literary theorists alike have been telling us for some time now that we tend to find in the objects of our study what we bring to them, what we need and want to see, conditioned by what and how we have been taught to see. This dictum holds true for the biographer, who creates the life of a chosen subject, as well as for the reviewer of that biography, who reads, comments on, and thus re-creates the narrative of the life in question. Of the various approaches or lenses that we may bring to bear upon a text, each of us has one which enables us to focus clearly, and for Leonard Marcus the lens through which he most effectively views the life of Margaret Wise Brown is that of children's literature.

The product of more than nine years of research and writing, which included examining unpublished letters and family papers and conducting dozens of interviews with Brown's friends, colleagues, and relatives, Marcus's portrait of Margaret Wise Brown is compelling. Marcus excels in his accounts of Brown's years at Hollins College, Virginia, and her emergence as a writer of children's books in the mid-1930s. He carefully delineates her pivotal role in the creation of the modern picture book from the late 1930s through the 1940s and 1950s, the period now considered the golden age of the American picture book.

Brown began writing books for children during her association with Lucy Sprague Mitchell at the Bureau of Educational Experiments, known as Bank Street (its Greenwich Village address). Under Mitchell's tutelage, Brown became immersed in what Mitchell termed the "Here and Now" world of the very young. A progressive educator, Mitchell believed that the immediate and urgent sense impressions of children and their own daily experiences should form the basis of their education and reading; she proposed the creation of a new kind of juvenile literature: "a developmentally sound here-and-now literature based on [Mitchell's] own observations of children aged two to seven" (Marcus 52). To enhance her literary experiment, Mitchell enlisted the trainees in Bank Street's Cooperative School for Student Teachers (one of whom was Brown herself) to write stories, try them out on young listeners at the school, and then revise the stories based on the children's responses.

Marcus provides a thorough and lively account of the half-century-long "Fairy Tale War" that ensued. Under Mitchell's guidance, Bank Street writers advocated a literature grounded in a young child's sensory impressions and everyday experiences (disparagingly referred to by one writer as the "Beep beep crunch crunch" school of children's literature), while traditional arbiters of the standards for children's books—notably the children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Public Library—continued to regard childhood as a state of innocence, which should be nurtured with "once upon a time" folk and fantasy literature (161). According to Marcus, a purchase order from the New York Public Library was regarded as not only a "major critical endorsement" but also an assurance of respectable sales for a children's book. Thus, the omission of Bank Street—inspired children's books from both the library's purchase orders and its "annual fall lists of new books recommended for holiday gift giving" (55)—an omission prompted by the Fairy Tale War—posed long-term publishing difficulties for writers of the Bank Street persuasion.

From her first creative efforts at Bank Street, Brown went on to become...