a b Flynn, Meagan. "Who could hate 'Goodnight Moon'? This powerful New York librarian". Washington Post . Retrieved January 14, 2020. Dip your fingertips into the white paint. Press them to the blue circle. Press firmly and release, leaving a thumbprint behind. By the time Brown met Strange, who was twenty years her senior, Strange had married her third husband, a prominent lawyer, and was spending much of her time dining at women’s clubs and moaning away hangovers. They began a torrid affair. Eventually, Strange left her husband and persuaded Brown to move into an apartment across from hers, in a building on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion. The lovers entered and left each other’s residence as they pleased, and shared a butler named Pietro.

At the same time that Mitchell’s ideas inspired Brown, they offended one of the most powerful figures in American children’s literature: Anne Carroll Moore, the head of the children’s division at the New York Public Library. Moore, who believed in starting children off with Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter, was suspicious of the social sciences, and, like some of her fellow-librarians, she doubted whether meaningful children’s literature could be engineered through the empirical study of children. As Leonard S. Marcus records in his deeply reported 1992 biography, “ Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon,” the two camps engaged in a decades-long standoff—often called the Fairy-Tale War. Moore believed that traditional myths and legends connected children with “higher truths,” and considered stories without morals to be a waste of time. Marcus notes that the library’s internal review of “Goodnight Moon” deemed it “unbearably sentimental.” The book didn’t appear on the shelves of city libraries until 1972—eleven years after Moore’s death, and twenty years after Brown’s.

Take a Goodnight Moon Book Walk

On July 15, 1999, Goodnight Moon was adapted into a 26-minute animated family video special/ documentary, which debuted on HBO Family in December of that year, [26] and was released on VHS on April 15, 2000, and DVD in 2005, in the United States. The special features an animated short of Goodnight Moon, narrated by Susan Sarandon, along with six other animated segments of children's bedtime stories and lullabies with live-action clips of children reflecting on a series of bedtime topics in between, a reprise of Goodnight Moon at the end, and the Everly Brothers' " All I Have To Do Is Dream" playing over the closing credits. The special is notable for its post-credits clip, which features a boy being interviewed about dreams but stumbling over his sentence, which soon became a meme in 2011 when it was uploaded on YouTube. He was referencing a line from the 1997 Disney animated film Hercules. [27] The boy's identity was unknown until July 2021, when he came forward as Joseph Cirkiel in a video interview with Youtuber wavywebsurf. [28] In 1947, Brown published what is now her most famous book, “Goodnight Moon.” The action in this spare, poetic story about a bunny at bedtime is slow-moving, and the scene never really changes. As the young rabbit tosses and turns in a green-walled bedroom, saying good night to various things in the room—a mouse, a comb, a red balloon—Clement Hurd’s illustrations, in deep jewel tones, slowly dim, panel by panel, and a soft scrim of stars outside the window begins to brighten. a b c Kois, Dan (January 13, 2020). "How One Librarian Tried to Squash Goodnight Moon". Slate Magazine . Retrieved January 14, 2020. painful shy animal dignity with which a child stretches to conform to a strange, adult social politeness.”

Cooper, Susan (1981). Betsy Hearne; Marilyn Kay (eds.). Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland. New York: Lathrop, Lee, and Shepard Books. pp. 15. ISBN 0-688-00752-X.Crawford, Amy (January 17, 2017). "The Surprising Ingenuity Behind "Goodnight Moon" ". Smithsonian . Retrieved January 27, 2017. Goodnight Moon is a classic and well-loved American children’s picture book from 1947. It was written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. Many American adults remember it as their favourite bedtime story, and it continues to lull young children to sleep to this very day. She often summoned her childhood memories when writing drafts, but she also tried to reorient herself to the level of children or little animals. Occasionally, she’d even lie low on a patch of grass, to feel again what it was like to be very small. While working on “ The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile” (1938), she wrote to her publisher that she was fascinated by children’s passionate engagement with smells and colors and sounds—“so fresh to their brand new senses.” When you talk to a child, she later told one of her former Hollins professors, “he may not be listening to you at all—he will just be feeling the fur collar on your coat.”

Goodnight Moon may now seem like such a simple book, but it was once considered unconventional, as was Brown's entire philosophy of writing for children (along with others at the Writers Lab). Instead of fables and fairy tales, Brown focused on the familiar, everyday sights and sounds in a child's life. From the "puff, puff, puff and chug, chug, chug" of a train and a mother's "hush" to wishing objects goodnight and noting what is "important" about things, she blazed a trail for a new type of writing for children. A parody written by David Milgrim and published under the pseudonym “Ann Droyd” in October 2011, Goodnight iPad: a Parody for the next generation “shows a very different homelife 50 years later, with mobile devices, social networks, and non-stop streaming media.” [37] In a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association listed the book as one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children". [17] In 2012 it was ranked number four among the "Top 100 Picture Books" in a survey published by School Library Journal. [18]

Well, I don’t especially like children, either. At least not as a group. I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he is little.” Writer Robin Bernstein suggests that Goodnight Moon is popular largely because it helps parents put children to sleep. [23] Bernstein distinguishes between "going-to-bed" books that help children sleep and "bedtime books" that use nighttime as a theme. Goodnight Moon, Bernstein argues, is both a bedtime book and a going-to-bed book, whereas Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is a bedtime book because it "has as much potential to excite as to tranquilize child readers." [24] Animated adaptation [ edit ]