Brown’s father, Robert, was an executive at a company that manufactured twine. Her mother, Maude, was a homemaker who had dreamed of becoming an actress according to Amy Gary, the author of a 2017 biography, “ In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown,” Maude was prone to bouts of depression, sometimes refusing to leave her room. Her books-including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year-delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.īrown was born in Brooklyn in 1910, the second of three children. Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. And she often commissioned illustrations from modernist painters who understood the allure of bold color.

Brown incorporated influences from avant-garde literature, concentrating as much on the sound of words as on the words themselves. When boys and girls are first exposed to reading, Brown argued, they are most engaged by stories about “tables and chairs, plates and telephones, animals they know.” Even though her work embraced everyday subjects, it was far from banal. She rejected this orthodoxy in favor of stories that better reflected the preoccupations of young children, from sensual pleasures (the shape of an apple) to visceral emotions (fear of the dark). When Brown was emerging as a writer, in the nineteen-thirties, most books for young children drew on classic fables and folktales, providing moral instruction on each page. Many readers now think of Brown titles like “ The Runaway Bunny” as tranquil introductions to storytelling, but they were radical for their time.

At the age of forty-two, she died suddenly, in the South of France, after a clot cut off the blood supply to her brain. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a fetish for fur, and hunted rabbits on weekends. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. They are the country's national symbol and appear on coins, postage stamps, and airplanes.Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “ Wild Things,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”-just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “ Goodnight Moon,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules.

Kangaroos outnumber people in Australia.A joey sometimes will jump headfirst into its mother’s pouch if frightened.This is an energy-efficient and fast means of travel, which enables them to go long distances in areas where there is little water and food available. Kangaroos are the only big animals to hop as their main method of locomotion.Due to the position of their eyes, Red kangaroos' range of vision is approximately 300° (324° with about 25° overlap).On land kangaroos always move their back legs together, but in water, they will kick each leg independently when swimming.Red kangaroos can jump as high as six feet (1.8 m), and leap a distance of 29 feet (8.8 m).A joey is about the size of a jellybean when born.The red is, in fact, a musky red oil this is excreted from glands in their skin. Red kangaroos are so-named due to the color of their fur.Males are 'boomers', females are 'flyers' and young are 'joeys'.

Kangaroo moon night book cover red