David Milgrim Popular Books

David Milgrim Biography & Facts

Goodnight Moon is an American children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. It was published on September 3, 1947, and is a highly acclaimed bedtime story. This book is the second in Brown and Hurd's "classic series," which also includes The Runaway Bunny and My World. The three books have been published together as a collection titled Over the Moon. Background In 1935, author Margaret Wise Brown enrolled at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York, NY. At Bank Street, Brown studied childhood development alongside the school’s founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who believed that children preferred stories about everyday topics rather than fantasies. Mitchell’s ideas combined with Brown’s observance of what children enjoyed formed the foundation for Brown’s writing going forward, including the familiar world depicted in Goodnight Moon. In 1945, the idea for Goodnight Moon appeared to Margaret Wise Brown in a dream. She wrote down the story in the morning, with the original title of the book being Goodnight Room. Brown gave illustrator Clement Hurd very little direction on the illustrations, and the characters in Goodnight Moon are depicted as rabbits because Hurd was better at drawing rabbits than humans. This was among several decisions made regarding the illustrations over the course of the book’s creation. Other revisions include replacing a framed map on the wall with a scene from The Runaway Bunny and blurring the udder of the “cow that jumped over the moon.” Publication history Illustrator Clement Hurd said in 1983 that initially the book was to be published using the pseudonym "Memory Ambrose" for Brown, with his illustrations credited to "Hurricane Jones." Goodnight Moon had poor initial sales: only 6,000 copies were sold upon initial release in the fall of 1947. Anne Carroll Moore, the influential children's librarian at the New York Public Library (NYPL), regarded it as "overly sentimental." The NYPL and other libraries did not acquire it at first. During the post-World War II Baby Boom years, it slowly became a bestseller. Annual sales grew from about 1,500 copies in 1953 to almost 20,000 in 1970; by 1990, the total number of copies sold exceeded four million. As of 2007, the book sells about 800,000 copies annually, and by 2017 had cumulatively sold an estimated 48 million copies. Goodnight Moon has been translated into Spanish, French, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Catalan, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Hmong and German. In 1952, at the age of 42, Margaret Wise Brown died following a routine operation, and did not live to see the success of her book. Brown bequeathed the royalties to the book (among many others) to Albert Clarke, who was the nine-year-old son of a neighbor when Brown died. Clarke, who squandered the millions of dollars the book earned him, said that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss. In 2005, publisher HarperCollins digitally altered the photograph of illustrator Hurd, which had been on the book for at least twenty years, to remove a cigarette. HarperCollins' editor-in-chief for children's books, Kate Jackson, said, "It is potentially a harmful message to very young [children]." HarperCollins had the reluctant permission of Hurd's son, Thacher Hurd, but the younger Hurd said the photo of Hurd with his arm and fingers extended, holding nothing, "looks slightly absurd to me." HarperCollins has said it will likely replace the picture with a different, unaltered photo of Hurd in future editions. Other editions In addition to several octavo and duodecimo paperback editions, Goodnight Moon is available as a board book and in "jumbo" edition designed for use with large groups. 1991, US, HarperFestival ISBN 0-694-00361-1, publication date September 30, 1991, board book. 1997, US, HarperCollins ISBN 0-06-027504-9, publication date February 28, 1997, Hardback 50th anniversary edition. 2007, US, HarperCollins ISBN 0-694-00361-1, publication date January 23, 2007, Board book 60th anniversary edition. In 2008, Thacher Hurd used his father's artwork from Goodnight Moon to produce Goodnight Moon 123: A Counting Book. In 2010, HarperCollins used artwork from the book to produce Goodnight Moon's ABC: An Alphabet Book. In 2015, Loud Crow Interactive Inc. released a Goodnight Moon interactive app. Synopsis The text is a rhyming poem, describing an anthropomorphic bunny's bedtime ritual of saying "good night" to various inanimate and living objects in the bunny's bedroom: a red balloon, a pair of socks, the bunny's dollhouse, a bowl of mush, and two kittens, among others; despite the kittens, a mouse is present in each spread. The book begins at 7:00 PM, and ends at 8:10 PM, with each spread being spaced 10 minutes apart, as measured by the two clocks in the room, and reflected (improbably) in the rising moon. The illustrations alternate between 2-page black-and-white spreads of objects and 2-page color spreads of the room, like the other books in the series (a common cost-saving technique at the time). Allusions and references Goodnight Moon contains a number of references to Brown and Hurd's The Runaway Bunny, and to traditional children's literature. For example, the room of Goodnight Moon generally resembles the next-to-last spread of The Runaway Bunny, where the little bunny becomes a little boy and runs into a house, and the mother bunny becomes the little boy's mother; shared details include the fireplace and the painting by the fireplace of "The Cow Jumping Over the Moon," though other details differ (the colors of the walls and floor are switched, for instance). The painting is itself a reference to the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle," where a cow jumps over the moon. However, when reprinted in Goodnight Moon, the udder was reduced to an anatomical blur to avoid the controversy that E.B. White's Stuart Little had undergone when published in 1945. The painting of three bears, sitting in chairs, alludes to "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" (originally "The Story of the Three Bears"), which also contains a copy of the cow jumping over the moon painting. The other painting in the room, which is never explicitly mentioned in the text, portrays a bunny fly-fishing for another bunny, using a carrot as bait. This picture is also a reference to The Runaway Bunny, where it is the first colored spread, when the mother says that if the little bunny becomes a fish, she will become a fisherman and fish for him. The top shelf of the bookshelf, below the Runaway Bunny painting, holds an open copy of The Runaway Bunny, and there is a copy of Goodnight Moon on the nightstand. A telephone is mentioned early in the book. The primacy of the reference to the telephone indicates that the bunny is in his mother's room and his mother's bed. Literary significance and reception In a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association listed the book as one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for C.... Discover the David Milgrim popular books. Find the top 100 most popular David Milgrim books.