More Margaret Wise Brown

Dear Mr Finch, 

Just sending you another quick letter about Margaret Wise Brown. I've been reading Leonard S Marcus' excellent biography of her, Awakened by the Moon, and it's becoming more and more apparent that her greatest curse is that she innovated so much we now take for granted. There's a theme running through it that, as an ex librarian yourself and as an ex librarian myself, I thought you would find particularly fascinating of how much control over American children's fiction tastes was held by innovative - but quite traditional and conservative - librarian Anne Carroll Moore. A vital figure in highlighting the importance of books to the development of children, especially through the New York Public Library's lists of important books and her reviews for the Horn Book, she also had very traditional views of what made for "proper" literature for children and Brown was not one of those.

Brown came through the Bank Street College of Education which gave her writing for children a sense of novelty and focus that picture books didn't have at the time. She and her collaborators, who went on to create their own books, seemed to be innovating all the time but as is often the way with innovators we now don't see those moments of brilliance in quite the same way because we take them for granted. It's the ultimate irony really, that hotbed of creativity and new ways of talking to children and their parents is now the norm, so none of it has quite the same sense of shock that it must have had at the time.

Her most famous book, Goodnight Moon, is particularly easy to underestimate. It seems so simple and almost basic in art and writing that you have to come at it fresh to see quite how quietly revolutionary it must have been. Because I didn't grown up with this book - it seems far more iconic in America, so my wife immediately knew it - this was my first proper reading and what impressed me most was how much work has gone into making something that looks so simple and straightforward.

The story is simplicity itself. A bunny is going to sleep. All the details are very subtle though - the bunny is clearly reluctant to sleep and keeps shifting on the pillow (including a lovely moment where it seems to be trying to get out of bed); there's a balloon which suggests there's been an exciting day - and done so lightly it practically begs a child (and parent) to fill in the gaps in the narrative themselves. The old lady is presumably the mum but why not called the mum? Why do the kittens not bother with the small mouse? It's such a simple trick but a beautiful one to engage deeper with the book.

The text itself is also very simple, but Brown's best trick is how the text repeats itself before slowly losing elements, surely mirroring how the brain close to the inevitability of sleep starts forgetting crucial steps in the thought process before sleep overwhelms you. Together with the image of the bunny wriggling and reluctant to sleep - and maybe even that balloon - you start to fill in your own backstory without even realising it.

As with so many artistic pioneers, it's hard to imagine how revolutionary it must have been at the time. The innovations of Hitchcock or Orson Welles, and even Buster Keaton and Eisenstein, are so second nature to us now you have to try and remove yourself from the decades of art that have refined and revived those inspired moments of novelty before you can see the genius of the original work.