‘Goodnight Moon’ Cements American Icon Status

What do Elvis, Mr. Rogers, and Rosa Parks have in common? All have been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps due to their status as American icons. Now beloved children’s book Goodnight Moon is joining their ranks with its own set of celebratory stamps.

Goodnight Moon, which was written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, first hit bookstore shelves in 1947 and has divided audiences ever since. Its color palette is odd, and its plot nonexistent. Nevertheless, Goodnight Moon has sold more than 40 million copies.

Children’s authors—and especially picture book authors—occupy an ambiguous position in the literary hierarchy. Are their endeavors commercial, artistic, or a mix of the two? And how difficult is it, really, to write a book for young readers?

Anyone can write a children’s book, but that doesn’t mean children will like it. That’s why Brown tirelessly tested all of her material in front of youngsters. She read drafts of early hits like The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile and The Noisy Book to classrooms full of kids. Later, she read them to the children of a lifelong friend. For some, it’s hard to reconcile Brown’s bohemian life and untraditional love affairs—which included many men and at least one woman—with her focus on writing stories about bunnies and kittens. 

Brown never married or had children, but she understood them—not as a mother, but as a kindred soul. Not only did Brown enjoy nature and bright colors and repetition, like children do, but as an adult she could still feel the emotions they felt. From childhood, Brown had a strained relationship with her mother, Maude, and later turned to psychoanalysis to cope. In Brown’s classic book The Runaway Bunny, a mother bunny tells her baby bunny that she’d turn into a fisherman, a gust of wind, even a human in order to stay close to him. The tale becomes much more poignant when the reader realizes Brown isn’t writing what she’d say as a mother—she’s writing what she wanted to hear as a child.

Brown’s work was radical in its own way, as Anna Holmes pointed out in her 2022 profile of Brown in The New Yorker. She was part of the emerging “Here and Now” school of thought, which introduced children to literature through stories of the everyday. This did not win her any favors with the children’s division of the New York Public Library, which emphasized moral fairy tales and fables. The library system didn’t even have copies of Goodnight Moon until 1972, two decades after Brown died at the age of 42. The so-called “fairy tale war” within children’s literature is long forgotten now, with Brown and Beatrix Potter alike considered classic children’s authors.

Brown was more than a children’s book author. She was an editor, songwriter, talent scout, and—if those who worked with her are to be believed—a genius. She would conceptualize an entire book in her head, create a “dummy book” (like a storyboard), and find the perfect artist to help her bring her project to life. Often, she recruited artists who had never illustrated anything for children before. 

One of those artists was Clem Hurd. Brown tracked him down after seeing his art displayed in a friend’s bathroom. Their partnership would be a fruitful one. Brown even introduced him to the woman who would become his wife, her friend and fellow writer Edith “Posey” Thacher. Hurd did the surreal illustrations for The Runaway Bunny—which includes a very Goodnight Moon-esque red room—in 1942. He teamed up with Brown five years later to illustrate Goodnight Moon after she had an unusually vivid dream about a room with green walls and red furniture, where she repeated a childhood ritual of saying “good night” to every object. Hurd had just completed military duty in the South Pacific, and he and Posey passed many days in Brown’s cottage after their return to New York. 

“Margaret was very excited about the Hurds’ return. She’d kept in contact with Posey, and they had collaborated on a couple of Golden books, but nothing was better than working together in person. When the three of them were in one another’s company, they inspired each other,” Amy Gary writes in her 2017 biography of Brown, In the Great Green Room.

Together, Hurd and Brown made magic. Weird magic. Children’s authors Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen mused on the staying power of Goodnight Moon in a recent post on their straightforwardly titled Substack, “Looking At Picture Books”: 

“[Goodnight Moon] uses the tools of the picture book—language and pictures—to encompass so much of the experience of falling asleep. How hallucinatory and bizarre falling asleep is. How so much of falling asleep is feeling very awake. And most importantly, how scary falling asleep can be. ‘Goodnight nobody’ acknowledges the chthonic dread of bedtime. Yes, sleep is mysterious and unknowable. Yes, the whole thing is weirdly proximate to death. These are uncomfortable truths, the stuff adults don’t like talking about, and it’s comforting, as a kid, to have them validated by a picture book.”

And now you can send your mail with a stamp featuring the lamp, or the hearth, or even the sleepy little bunny from this children’s book about the “chthonic dread of bedtime.” Each detail is instantly recognizable as being from Goodnight Moon. But not everyone is happy with the preliminary design of the stamps. “Format of Goodnight Moon pane a pain for collectors,” warned the philately-focused Linn’s Stamp News in a January post. 

“If the stamps haven’t been printed yet, I would strongly encourage the USPS to reconsider the layout of the pane,” post author Jay Bigalke writes. “The current layout might be pleasing to a designer, but if the pane is issued this way, it would be a headache for collectors who would like blocks of the eight different designs and Scott catalog editors who will have to determine what to do when numbering the stamps.”

As Brown’s time in the publishing world taught her, everyone’s a critic. For Brown that holds true even in death, the last sleep.