Bernstein, Robin (2020). ""'You Do It!': Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature" ". PMLA. 135 (5): 877-894 . Retrieved December 28, 2021. Margaret Wise Brown wrote hundreds of books and stories during her life, but she is best known for Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Even though she died nearly 70 years ago, her books still sell very well. There are three books in the series, all by the same author and illustrator, the others being “The Runaway Bunny” and “My World”. These three books have been published together as a collection, with the overall title “Over the Moon”. Survivors of an extraterrestrial organism's killings in 2017 science-fiction film Life read excerpts from the book. [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] Goodnight, Moon is the chilling portrayal of a small child (represented, oddly enough, by a rabbit), listing the things in their bedroom and then saying goonight to them, one by one.

Quite prolific in her work, Margaret Wise Brown originally worked as a teacher, and also studied art. It was while working at the “Bank Street Experimental School” in New York City, that she started writing books for children. The school believed in a new approach to children’s education and literature, one which was rooted in the real world, and the here and now. Margaret Wise Brown embraced both this philosophy, and also was influenced by the poet Gertrude Stein.Most classic poets painted death with a palette of the morose and depressing. There was no room for cliché rhymes and red balloons in the classic written rendering of death, until Margaret Wise Brown came into the picture. In 1947, Brown threw out all the conventions established by previous poets writing about death, bidding folks like Yeats and Donne to say “goodnight air” as she peppered her death poetry with balloons, bears, and cows jumping over the moon. Just a few months before she died suddenly from an embolism following emergency surgery in Nice, France, the 42-year-old Brown—who at the time was engaged to a much younger man—drafted a will. In it, she left the royalties to Goodnight Moon (and 68 other titles) to a young boy named Albert Clarke. She had befriended his mother through a colleague at Bank Street and lived near the family on East 71st Street in Manhattan. 11. Goodnight Moon's legacy endures.

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] The first episode of the Warner Bros. animated television series Animaniacs included a spoof of Goodnight Moon named "Nighty-Night Toon". [32]The January 13, 2002 edition of the comic strip Zits featured Jeremy Duncan, the main character, reciting a parody of the book; his room and curtains resembled those in the book. [35] Goodnight Moon is a deceptively simple children’s book that falls somewhere between a going-to-sleep narrative and a lullaby—and yet it remains one of the most universal cultural references even all these decades later. Here are a few things you might not have known about Margaret Wise Brown's sparse classic. 1. Goodnight Moon's style reflects real childhood semantics.