“It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” Mitchell wrote in the introduction to her influential 1921 Here and Now Story Book. Mitchell believed that young children are captivated by what they know firsthand and that fantasy can be distracting for them. As her biographers, Leonard Marcus in 1992 and Amy Gary in 2017, have pointed out, during the ’30s Brown came under the influence of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the founder of New York’s innovative Bank Street School for Children, which from its start was influenced by the progressive education theories of John Dewey. Margaret Wise Brown’s concentration on the ordinary in Goodnight Moon was no accident. The central figure of Goodnight Moon is a young bunny who before going to sleep finds it reassuring to say goodnight to everything in his room. The essence of Goodnight Moon is its faith in the way children invest their worlds with meaning.
There is not even a memorable character in Goodnight Moon. Unlike Make Way for Ducklings, it does not have a plot. Unlike “Cinderella,” it does not depend on miracles.
Unlike “Little Red Riding Hood,” Goodnight Moon does not grow out of folklore. Goodnight Moon represents the high point of the partnership between Brown, the author of multiple children’s books, and Hurd, who studied art in Paris during the ’30s with Fernand Leger. Since its publishing debut in 1947, Goodnight Moon, with its text by Margaret Wise Brown and its pictures by Clement Hurd, has sold 48 million copies. Just as important for us today is understanding how the success of Goodnight Moon is inseparable from the past and present children’s book conventions with which it breaks. That’s cause for celebration, especially in an era like our own when increasingly television and DVDs rather than books supply children with the stories they know best.īut it is not only the longevity of Goodnight Moon that is noteworthy. On September 3, the children’s classic Goodnight Moon marks its 70th anniversary.
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