Margaret Smart Brown (Might 23, 1910–November 13, 1952) lived her life on her personal phrases and died, far too younger, kicking her leg up can-can model out of a hospital mattress, abandoning Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny and 100 — hundred! — extra beloved kids’s books and a few devastatingly beautiful poems. She was unapologetically unusual: She swam bare within the chilly ocean, put a door in her home that opened out right into a plunging cliff, and purchased all of a flower vendor’s bouquets when she acquired her first paycheck for a guide. Even the love of her life was named Michael Strange. (Her actual title was Blanche Oelrichs.) Out of that strangeness she made wondrous, unexampled books that enchanted kids with their playful poetics and their largehearted candor. In her will, she decreed that an epitaph be etched onto her granite tombstone: “Margaret Smart Brown. Author of Songs and Nonsense.” Beneath it, the next inscription was added by those that cherished her:
Expensive Margaret,
You gave us all a lot —
An opportunity to like
A spot to relaxation
A window into residing.
A splendid window into her world opens up in The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown (public library) by author Mac Barnett and artist Sarah Jacoby, playfully titled after Brown’s essentialist masterpiece The Important Book.
Together with his merely worded richness of sentiment, Barnett guarantees on the opening web page:
Margaret Smart Brown lived for 42 years.
This guide is 42 pages lengthy.
You may’t match any individual’s life into 42 pages,
so I’m simply going to inform you some necessary issues.
Someway, these few “necessary issues” find yourself distilling the essence of Brown’s spirit. Emanating from all of them is a bigger love letter to the lifetime of books rendered via the lives of those that make them:
It may be odd to think about the lives of the individuals who write the books you learn,
like operating into your trainer on the grocery store.
However authors are folks.
They’re born they usually die.
They fall in love they usually fall in love once more.
They go to the grocery store to purchase tomatoes,
which they maintain within the backside drawers of their fridges,
though tomatoes ought to keep out on the counter.
However which of these items is necessary? And to whom?
Typically, the seemingly unimportant issues — the mundane selections, the quirks, the each day circumstance of being — find yourself turning into the constructing blocks of character and creativity. We be taught, for example, of the pets Margaret Smart Brown stored as somewhat lady residing in a home by the woods: a canine, two squirrels, seven fish, a pair of guinea pigs, a wild robin, and thirty-six rabbits — rabbits that impressed the central characters in a few of her most beloved books. Even Michael Unusual’s nickname for her was “Bunny-no-good.”
In one of many vignettes that string collectively the story of her life, Barnett writes:
This can be a story a couple of rabbit.
Margaret’s rabbits lived in an ideal massive hutch.
At first there have been a number of,
after which there have been many.
That’s how it’s with rabbits.
They’re born,
they usually die,
and when considered one of Margaret’s rabbits died,
she skinned the rabbit
and wore its pelt.
Margaret wrapped herself in that rabbit’s fur
and paraded earlier than her brother and sisters
(and the opposite rabbits as properly).
In consonance with Brown’s up to date E.B. White’s insistence that “anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time [because] you have to write up, not down,” Barnett provides:
There are individuals who will say a narrative like this
doesn’t belong in a kids’s guide.
However it occurred.
Margaret Smart Brown took up a rabbit
and took off its pelt,
and he or she did it when she was a toddler.
And isn’t it necessary that kids’s books
include the issues kids consider
and the issues kids do,
even when these issues appear unusual?
In Jacoby’s virtually unbearably tender illustrations, we see Brown swim joyously within the icy waters of her beloved Maine and romp together with her beloved canine Crispin’s Crispian and write story after story and persevere as a single highly effective librarian launches a censorship campaign in opposition to her books, leaving her out — fairly actually — on the steps of the New York Public Library toasting tea together with her editor, the indomitable Ursula Nordstrom (who as soon as composed the single finest response to censorship I’ve ever encountered when one other considered one of her authors, the younger Maurice Sendak, got here below hearth).
Barnett handles Brown’s tragic loss of life with touching candor and sensitivity, emanating a bigger meditation on the character of life:
Lives don’t work the best way most books do.
They will finish immediately,
as quick as you kick your leg within the air.
Lives are humorous and unhappy,
scary and comforting,
stunning and ugly,
however not after they’re speculated to be,
and generally all on the identical time.
There are patterns in a life,
and patterns in a narrative,
however in actual lives and good tales
the patterns are exhausting to see,
as a result of the reality is rarely fabricated from straight strains.
Lives are unusual.
Complement The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown with Brown’s personal least identified, strangest and most wondrous book about life and death, then revisit another incredible picture-book biographies of cultural icons: Emily Dickinson, John Lewis, Keith Haring, Maria Mitchell, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, E.E. Cummings, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, Frida Kahlo, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, Wangari Maathai, and Nellie Bly.
