Amazing,” Brown wrote to her college professor and mentor, Marguerite Hearsey. 'They tell me stories and I write them down. The adults at Bank Street were encouraged to take copious notes on the semantics and language styles used by young children. Founded by visionary educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the school's teachers, psychologists, and researchers worked in an actual nursery school to study early childhood development. It would prove to be a life-altering experience.

Three years later, when she was 25 and still searching for a career, Brown enrolled in Bank Street’s Cooperative School for Student Teachers. She graduated in 1932 and moved back to New York to live with her parents, dividing her time between various sports and day jobs. Brown attended Hollins College in Virginia, where she enjoyed the social life and athletics but struggled to find herself academically. She and her siblings (an older sister, Roberta, and a younger brother, Benjamin) spent their childhood at various boarding schools, and despite her father's concern that education would be wasted on the girls, all three went to college. Margaret Wise Brown was born in 1910 to moderately wealthy but distant and bickering parents. Goodnight Moon's style reflects real childhood semantics. Here are a few things you might not have known about Margaret Wise Brown's sparse classic.

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.

Goodnight moon anniversary