In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown(2)

It has been sixty years since those days, but over a half century later, her light is burning ever brighter.





A Note from the Author

For over twenty-five years, I’ve tried to live inside the wildly imaginative mind of Margaret Wise Brown. In 1990, I co-owned a small publishing company, and we worked with Margaret’s sister, Roberta, to reprint four of Margaret’s out-of-print and mostly forgotten books. Children’s publishing was again on the rise, and librarians still treasured Margaret’s works. We hoped to bring many more of her titles back to market, so one afternoon I found myself sitting on the floor of Roberta’s house in Jamaica, Vermont, looking through the bookshelf that was filled with Margaret’s books.

I had become friends with Roberta over the years as we worked together. We both had horses and collie dogs; we both had strong ties to Hollins University. Margaret graduated from that school, as did her mother. Almost all the women in my husband’s family were Hollins alumnae—in fact, his great-grandmother had attended Hollins at the same time as Margaret and Roberta’s mother.

Riffling through that shelf of books that day in Vermont, it suddenly struck me that I should ask Roberta if Margaret had left behind any unpublished manuscripts. Margaret had been prolific, and she died very suddenly. That meant there was a strong possibility that quite a few manuscripts had been left unpublished or unfinished. I hesitated before asking because Margaret is considered one of the foremost writers of children’s literature; educational programs at universities study her writing techniques. Goodnight Moon is a perennial bestseller, and many of the books she wrote for Golden still hold spots on their spinner racks in bookstores, drugstores, and department stores around the world. I figured that if Margaret had left a manuscript behind, surely another publisher would have discovered it long before I.

I was surprised by Roberta’s answer that yes, Margaret had been working on a large collection of poetry when she died. She’d called it The Green Wind. Unfortunately, that manuscript was in storage in the attic of Roberta’s barn; she would have to get the neighbor boy to bring down the heavy trunk.

Almost six months passed before Roberta called to invite me to come look at the manuscript. I arrived on a cold winter’s day in January, driving along snowy roads to get to her lovely farm at the base of the Green Mountains. When I walked in, Roberta was filling out sweepstakes coupons, the sort that had Ed McMahon as their spokesperson. I felt sorry for this divorced woman who lived alone in the woods of Vermont, hoping for a financial bonanza to arrive at her door.

Roberta opened the trunk. Inside were thin papers stacked end to end. She pointed to one end and said that The Green Wind manuscript was there. All the other papers in the trunk were unpublished, too. At first, I didn’t believe her. There were hundreds of papers in that trunk! Songs, music scores, stories, and poems. I thought surely I had misunderstood, or maybe Roberta was mistaken. It seemed unlikely that even someone as prolific as Margaret could have left behind all these manuscripts.

I took a stack of the papers back to my hotel that night. Their musty smell was too much to bear in the small room, so I opened a window to let the frigid Vermont air in as I read over each of the works. I didn’t recognize a single one of them.

Now that these gems had been uncovered, I was terrified they might disappear. I spent the next three days copying every piece of paper in that trunk, making a circuit between Roberta’s house, the bank to get quarters, and the local library, where the only copying machine in town was located.

The trunk held manuscripts and ideas for books that were years ahead of their time. Books with flaps and die cuts. Books that emerged from balls and toy barns. Stories written for the backs of cereal boxes. And songs, lots of songs. I hadn’t known Margaret loved music and was hoping to write popular songs that made it onto jukeboxes.

From that day to this, I have spent the better portion of my career working with Margaret’s papers, and it is a pleasure to work in her rarefied air. I have studied her contracts, read her diaries and letters, talked with her friends and loved ones. She gave me an education on how to work with illustrators and how to negotiate a contract. More important, she showed me how to live with awe and to love with abandon. For that, I am especially grateful.





Prologue

1950

First cry

Of the first hound.

And then other cries

Till it’s all one cry

Across the fields.

First spring

I have ankles and hinged feet.

An old body

Rises up in the new

And leans forward into the wind.

“RUNNING TO HOUNDS”

White Freesias


On a crisp, cold morning in January of 1950, a crowd of almost seventy people, clad in tweeds and corduroys, knee-high boots, and warm jackets, gathered at the stables of the large estate on the north shore of Long Island waiting for the call from the hunt master. The day’s hunt was to be a course of more than ten miles extending across neighboring estates. The direction of the expedition would ultimately be determined by the hounds’ chase of the hares. The rain from the previous evening had softened the ground, making for steadier downhill running for the hunters. On hard ground, it was easy to slip. The rains also removed all traces of lingering snow, which held the scent of hares long gone.

Some of the beagling clubs had resorted to hunting cottontails instead of the imported jacks as these hunts grew less and less successful. Sprawling country estates were being divided by creeping suburbanization. An Austrian jackrabbit was spotted the day before almost a mile northwest, so the field would travel in that direction.