In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown

By Amy Gary

The extraordinary life of the woman behind the beloved children’s classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny comes alive in this fascinating biography of Margaret Wise Brown.

Margaret’s books have sold millions of copies all over the world, but few people know that she was at the center of a children’s book publishing revolution. Her whimsy and imagination fueled a steady stream of stories, book ideas, songs, and poems and she was renowned for her prolific writing and business savvy, as well as her stunning beauty and endless thirst for adventure.

Margaret started her writing career by helping to shape the curriculum for the Bank Street School for children, making it her mission to create stories that would rise above traditional fairy tales and allowed girls to see themselves as equal to boys. At the same time, she also experimented endlessly with her own writing. Margaret would spend days researching subjects, picking daisies, cloud gazing, and observing nature, all in an effort to precisely capture a child’s sense of awe and wonder as they discovered the world.

Clever, quirky, and incredibly talented, Margaret embraced life with passion, lived extravagantly off of her royalties, went on rabbit hunts, and carried on long and troubled love affairs with both men and women. Among them were two great loves in Margaret’s life. One was a gender-bending poet and the ex-wife of John Barrymore. She went by the stage name of Michael Strange and she and Margaret had a tempestuous yet secret relationship, at one point living next door to each other so that they could be together. After the dissolution of their relationship and Michael’s death, Margaret became engaged to a younger man, who also happened to be the son of a Rockefeller and a Carnegie. But before they could marry Margaret died unexpectedly at the age of forty-two, leaving behind a cache of unpublished work and a timeless collection of books that would go on become classics in children’s literature.

In In the Great Green Room, author Amy Gary captures the eccentric and exceptional life of Margaret Wise Brown, and drawing on newly-discovered personal letters and diaries, reveals an intimate portrait of a creative genius whose unrivaled talent breathed new life in to the literary world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781250065377

Amy Gary

In 1990, AMY GARY discovered hundreds of unpublished works by Margaret Wise Brown in Margaret's sister's attic. Since then, Gary has catalogued, edited, and researched all of Brown's writings. She has been covered in Vanity Fair, in Entertainment Weekly, and on NPR, among other media outlets. She was formerly the director of publishing at Lucasfilm and headed the publishing department at Pixar studios.

Book preview

Prologue

1950

First cry

Of the first hound.

And then other cries

Till it’s all one cry

Across the fields.

First spring

I have ankles and hinged feet.

An old body

Rises up in the new

And leans forward into the wind.

RUNNING TO HOUNDS

White Freesias

On a crisp, cold morning in January of 1950, a crowd of almost seventy people, clad in tweeds and corduroys, knee-high boots, and warm jackets, gathered at the stables of the large estate on the north shore of Long Island waiting for the call from the hunt master. The day’s hunt was to be a course of more than ten miles extending across neighboring estates. The direction of the expedition would ultimately be determined by the hounds’ chase of the hares. The rain from the previous evening had softened the ground, making for steadier downhill running for the hunters. On hard ground, it was easy to slip. The rains also removed all traces of lingering snow, which held the scent of hares long gone.

Some of the beagling clubs had resorted to hunting cottontails instead of the imported jacks as these hunts grew less and less successful. Sprawling country estates were being divided by creeping suburbanization. An Austrian jackrabbit was spotted the day before almost a mile northwest, so the field would travel in that direction.

The hunt master readied his horn and blew for the hunt to begin. The crowd followed the hounds at a rapid clip across the road and onto a newly plowed field. The beagles were of the shorter variety, only fourteen inches at their withers, so runners could keep up. They ran far behind the dogs to avoid contaminating the trail. They picked their way around bushes, fences, and thick forests, hoping to be the first to the site of the kill and earn the trophy from that day’s hunt—a coveted mask or pad of the rabbit. The group followed the dogs over a hill and into a valley.

Margaret Wise Brown drove up in her yellow convertible after the field had crested the horizon. She liked to arrive late and knew she would have no trouble catching up to the group. This one day of the week away from the city and her busy life of telephone calls and deadlines was her favorite time. She might walk alone, or run behind the group in silence. Most of the time, though, she found herself chatting effortlessly for six or seven miles with someone who owned a stable of Thoroughbred racehorses—or the person who mucked the stalls of those same horses. A shared desire to run with the hounds was the common bond.

She parked her car near the kennel and walked down the road. A man near a barn pointed, and she took off running in that direction. She soon heard the crooning release of the hounds as they spotted a hare and the cry of Tallyho! to her right. They were beyond the woods, past a furrowed field. She adjusted her course to intersect with the dogs, leaping over the small, even rises of dark dirt that were littered with frozen pink and white turnips too small to harvest. She liked the popping sound they made under her sneakers and timed her pace to land on the little bulbs as she made her way to the trees.

Her stamina and agility often placed her at the front of the throng. She was known to plunge fearlessly through a thicket rather than around it, as most of the hunters opted to do. Those scratchy shortcuts won her more than a few rabbits’ feet. As she approached the woods, she realized she would have to skirt this patch of trees. Horse brier vines covered the ground, and even she was no match for their fierce stickers. She passed the woods and looked for a path in the valley beyond. A trail would eventually appear, she was sure. It always did.

She ran lightly, pulling herself up by her shoulders as she sprinted through the green and red grasses of the valley. The past few months had taken a toll on her body and spirit. She desperately wanted to lose the twenty pounds she had gained since her lover had left her. Most evenings, wine seemed a better remedy for her loneliness than exercise.

Running in these fields, though, Margaret once again felt young. She had grown up here, and she had spent many afternoons of her youth riding her horse through these same pastures. She had swum in the nearby ocean and built houses of sticks and leaves in these forests.

She saw a trail of trampled grass and broken sticks and instantly knew it was a path the dogs had made. She followed it up the hill and on the next rise saw one of the whips coaxing a dog back on course with the snap of his whip while at a full run, something she had yet to conquer. She caught up to him as the pack circled a dead hare in the grass. The dogs were particularly excited; they hadn’t hunted for a few days, and it would be hard to pull them back. The master called the dogs down and then reached in to grasp the body of the bunny. He held it high above his head, an indication to the dogs that this prize was no longer theirs. The pack reluctantly obeyed.

It was clear this rabbit was dead before the dogs had found it, shot by a frustrated farmer, no doubt. As the rest of the runners drew close, two gunshots were fired in the distance. Margaret quipped that two more rabbits had just been killed, which drew a round of chuckles from the field. In reality, she always felt sorry for the death of the rabbit, especially if it were one that had escaped before.

Suddenly, there was a stir among the hounds. Then they went still. Their quickening sniffs meant another hare was close by. The master shouted to the field to hold hard, and all the hunters froze, allowing the dogs to pick up the new scent. The dogs flushed a hare from a patch of grass, and once again the hunt was on. The jack bounded across the field, then darted sideways. Margaret knew the poor bunnies often circled back in desperation. Sometimes this tactic worked, but if the rabbit ran straight, the hounds could seldom keep pace. Sooner or later, though, it would run for home or cover, and the attempted escape often sent the bunny straight into people or hounds instead of an open field.

This one, though, burst onto a grassy road and sped away from the dogs and humans. He held his ears high and straight as he bounced out of sight. That, Margaret thought, was a beautiful thing to see.

One

1910–1914

Once upon a summertime

A bug was crawling on a vine

A butterfly lit on a daisy

While a little bee

Buzzed himself crazy in a wild pink rose

And a child ran through the wet green grass

In his bare feet and wiggled his toes

ONCE UPON A SUMMERTIME

The Unpublished Works of Margaret Wise Brown

The moon and sky over Brooklyn, New York, was bathed in the golden hue of an aurora borealis in the early morning hours of May 23. Sheet lightning to the south and east illuminated the shifting rays in a staccato dance of light. As the rising sun diminished the auroral lights, panic rose in the house of Bruce and Maude Brown. The baby they had been expecting more than two weeks earlier was now arriving in a rush. But the doctor was nowhere to be found.

Bruce was seriously ill with malaria contracted on a recent business trip and could be of little help. His nurse and Maude’s mother prepared, as best they could, to deliver the baby. Anna, their stern Irish nanny, paced the downstairs entry with the Brown’s two-year-old son, Gratz, waiting for the doctor to arrive. Maude’s screams in the final throes of labor were heard throughout the house and out the open door as the doctor dashed in. He bounded up the stairs, rolling his shirtsleeves as he climbed, reaching the bedside just in time to deliver the baby girl. He held her up for her mother to see, his cuff links still dangling from his sleeves.

That night, the sky was again ablaze with gold, green, and blue of the borealis that illuminated another celestial phenomenon. The earth’s shadow slowly stole the light of the full moon in a total lunar eclipse. It seemed as if the heavens were putting on a show to welcome the little girl Maude named Margaret Wise Brown.

*   *   *

Four years later, Maude Brown pressed Bruce for them to move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She found the walls of their neighborhood claustrophobic and believed the abundant nature Long Island offered would be good for their children. Bruce was reluctant to leave their formidable home on a hill. From there he could see the East River, and their house was a short walk to the docks and American Manufacturing Company’s warehouse, where he worked.

It was his job to travel to distant lands to purchase hemp and jute that were loaded onto massive cargo ships like the ones that streamed up and down the East River. Day and night, tiny tugs twirled about in the river, leading those large boats into port or out to sea. The whistles of the ships often drifted up the hill to the open windows of the Browns’ home. Transients from the docks, too, sometimes wandered into their neighborhood. The brick walls and wrought iron fences that lined the yards and streets silently declared that those people weren’t welcome. Even the cathedral at the end of their road appeared hostile instead of hospitable. Its imposing red doors cast a fortresslike air over the neighborhood.

The day Margaret and Gratz came home with a stranger, Bruce changed his mind about moving. The children were playing in their neighborhood park when they saw the man lying on the grass, looking up at the sky. They asked him what he was doing. He said that the sky’s shade of deep blue reminded him of his beloved homeland, Ireland. They delightedly told him that they, too, were Irish, so he shared captivating tales of the land he had left behind. The children invited him home for lunch, certain that their parents, who were quite proud of their Irish heritage, would want to meet this fellow countryman. Maude was gracious to the obviously impoverished man who sheepishly joined them at the table. Margaret and Gratz were not chastised for bringing the stranger home, but it wasn’t long before the Browns bought a sprawling home in Beechhurst on Long Island.

On the day of their move, Margaret sat in the back of the family’s open-air car with her grandmother as her father drove out of Brooklyn toward their new home on Long Island. She was named after this grandmother, a jolly Welsh woman with a beautiful singing voice. Margaret adored her and her lovely, lilting accent that sounded like music. She was much kinder than Margaret’s nanny, Anna, who dunked the little girl’s head under cold water every time she held her breath until she turned blue or threw a temper tantrum. Anna’s treatment had no lasting effect on Margaret’s innate stubborn streak. She liked the feeling of cold water on her