"Leonard S. Marcus... has masterfully written about a fascinating woman who in her short life changed literature for the very young. I was throroughly enchanted."--Eric Carle Nearly fifty years after her sudden death at the age of forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown remains a legend and an enigma. Author of Goodnight Moon , The Runaway Bunny , and dozens of other children's classics, Brown all but invented the picture book as we know it today. Combining poetic instinct with a profound empathy for small children, she understood a child's need for security, love, and a sense of being at home in the world. Yet, these were comforts that had eluded her. Her sparkling presence and her unparalleled success as a legendary children's book author masked an insecurity that left her restless and vulnerable. In this authoritative and moving biography, Leonard S. Marcus, who had access to never-before-published letters and family papers, portrays Brown's complex character and her tragic, seesaw life. Colorful, thoughtful, and insightful, Margaret Wise Brown is both a portrayal of a woman whose stories still speak to millions and a portrait of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when the literary world blossomed and made history. "An absorbing biography." -- The New York Times Book Review "More than a finely etched, honest portrait of an artist, Margaret Wise Brown is an exciting, fast-paced glimpse into the very beginnings of the golden age of children's book publishing in America. Leonard Marcus has restored Brown to her rightful place as both pioneer and poet." -- Maurice Sendak Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and dozens of other children's classics, all but invented the picture book as we know it today. Combining poetic instinct with a profound empathy for small children, she knew of a child's need for security, love, and a sense of being at home in the worldand she brought that unique tenderness to the page. Yet these were comforts that eluded her. Brown's youthful presence and professional successas an editor, bestselling author, and self-styled impresariomasked an insecurity that left her restless and vulnerable. In this moving biography, Marcus portrays Brown's complex character and her tragic, seesaw life. Her literary achievement and groundbreaking discoveries about small children's emotional needs were offset by tormented romances including a passionate relationship with Michael Strange, the celebrity socialite once married to John Barrymore. Leonard S. Marcus is a historian, biographer, and critic whose many books include Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon; Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; and Storied City . In addition, he has been Parenting magazine's children's book reviewer since 1987. This is his first picture book. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Amy Schwartz, and their son, Jacob. In an autobiographic sketch prepared for her publishers, Margaret Wise Brown once described her earliest childhood memories. Among them were images of a "city street with high iron gates, a red brick church at the end of the street and the sound of boats on the river"; a recollection of the "painful shy animal dignity with which a child stretches to conform to a strange adult social politeness"; thoughts about death, dreaming, "mysterious clock time," and aging; and a "problem of aesthetics I hadwhy wasnt an airedales {sic} face beautiful, if it was beautiful to me?" As a child, a favorite pastime of hers was to make up little tunes, to set poems she composed to old melodies, and to croon traditional songs like "Dixie"an anthem which beguiled her in part through a misunderstanding: "I thought Dixie Land and Sandy Bottom were two little girls. I envied them and cherished them, as a child does imaginary playmates, and I never understood why Dixie Land kept looking away, but that was just the way she was." As the author of more than fifty books, Margaret later observed that memory, the ultimate source of her creative work, is a "wild and private place," a place to which "we return truly only by accident"--the writers inspiration--"as in a dream or a song," or by "beaten paths"--the writers craft. Whatever the method or the path, she was convinced that "as you write, memory will come out in its true form." The iron gates were those along Milton Street, in the then fashionable section of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Robert and Maude Brown had settled as a newly married couple from Kirk-wood, Missouri, and where five years later, on May 23, 1910, their second child, Margaret, was born. Once a bucolic East River village within easy reach of Manhattan, Greenpoint by the turn of the century had been transformed into an "American Birmingham," a worthy rival to Englands industrial leviathan in the variety and quantity of its manufactures and in the declining quality of its air. Robert and Maude Brown, like many of their neighbors, had come to live there largely out of convenie