Margaret Wise Brown (1910 - 1952)

Margaret Wise Brown was born 23 May 1910 in Brooklyn, Kings, New York, United States. She was the daughter of Robert Bruce Brown and Maude Johnson. Brown was the middle child of three, whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She was the granddaughter of politician Benjamin Gratz Brown.

Life and career

In 1923 she attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut. In 1925 she attended The Kew-Forest School. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher and also studied art. While working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City, she started writing books for children. Bank Street promoted a new approach to children's education and literature, emphasizing the real world and the "here and now." This philosophy influenced Brown's work; she was also inspired by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose literary style influenced Brown's own writing.

Brown's first published children's book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers. Impressed by Brown's "here and now" style, W. R. Scott hired her as his first editor in 1938. Through Scott, she published the Noisy Book series among others. As editor at Scott, one of Brown's first projects was to recruit contemporary authors to write children's books for the company. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Brown's hero Gertrude Stein accepted the offer. Stein's book The World is Round was illustrated by Clement Hurd, who had previously teamed with Brown on W. R. Scott's Bumble Bugs and Elephants, considered "perhaps the first modern board book for babies." Brown and Hurd later teamed on the children's book classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, published by Harper. In addition to publishing a number of Brown's books, under her editorship W. R. Scott published Edith Thacher Hurd's first book, Hurry Hurry, and Esphyr Slobodkina's classic Caps for Sale.

From 1944 to 1946, Doubleday published three picture books written by Brown under the pseudonym "Golden MacDonald" (coopted from her friend's handyman) and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. (Weisgard was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1946, and he won the 1947 Medal, for Little Lost Lamb and The Little Island. Two more of their collaborations appeared in 1953 and 1956, after Brown's death.) The Little Fisherman, illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar, was published in 1945. The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Early in the 1950s she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series, including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog, and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.

Personal life and death

While at Hollins she was briefly engaged. She dated, for some time, an unknown "good, quiet man from Virginia", had a long-running affair with William Gaston, and had a summer romance with Preston Schoyer. In the summer of 1940, Brown began a long-term relationship with Blanche Oelrichs (nom de plume Michael Strange), poet/playwright, actress, and the former wife of John Barrymore. Despite the era’s strong taboo around same-sex relationships, the women moved into apartments next door to one another and lived as a couple, on and off, through most of the 1940s. As a studio, they used Cobble Court, a wooden house later moved to Charles Street. Oelrichs, who was 20 years Brown's senior, died in 1950.

In 1952, Brown met James Stillman Rockefeller Jr. at a party. A handsome great-nephew of J.D. Rockefeller, who was known to his friends as “Pebble,” he asked her to marry him. For their honeymoon, the couple planned to sail around the world. Before they could begin their grand adventure, Brown had to take a business trip to France, where she developed appendicitis. Her emergency surgery was successful, but the French doctor prescribed strict bed rest as she recovered. On the day scheduled for her release, 13 November 1952, a nurse asked how she felt. “Grand!” Brown declared, kicking up her feet—and dislodging a blood clot in her leg, which traveled to her brain and killed her within hours there in Nice, France at the age of 42.^[1][2]

By the time of Brown's death, she had authored well over one hundred books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House" in Vinalhaven, Maine.

Sources

1. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/76537198/margaret-wise-brown: accessed 14 September 2022), memorial page for Margaret Wise Brown (23 May 1910–13 Nov 1952) Find A Grave: Memorial #76537198; Maintained by Heaven's Gate (contributor 47351662) Burial Details Unknown.
2. ↑ Death: "U.S., Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835-1974"
   National Archives at College Park; College Park, Maryland, U.S.A.; NAI Number: 302021; Record Group Title: General Records of the Department of State; Record Group Number: Record Group 59; Series Number: Publication A1 205; Box Number: 993; Box Description: 1950-1954 France (including Corsica) A - Bu
   Ancestry Sharing Link - Ancestry Record 1616 #126898 (accessed 16 June 2023)
   Margaret Wise Brown death 13 Nov 1952 (age 42), child of Robert Bruce Brown.

See also:

• Wikidata: Item Q5970117
• Wikipedia article on Margaret Wise Brown
• Hollins Announces Winner of the 2023 Margaret Wise Brown Prize in Children’s Literature. Hollins University, April 17, 2023
• Bank Street Hosts Inaugural Margaret Wise Brown Board Book Award Ceremony and Educational Program. Bank Street College of Education, March 27, 2023