Goodnight Moon

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And she often commissioned illustrations from modernist painters who understood the allure of bold color.

The bears are sitting in a room—in their room hangs the same picture of a cow jumping over the moon. Her romances were volatile: she was engaged to two men but never married, and she had a decade-long affair with a woman. According to Clement Hurd, in an early handwritten version of Goodnight Moon, Brown had listed the authors as "Memory Ambrose" (the name of a friend's housekeeper) and the illustrator as "Hurricane Jones".When you take a book walk, you are taking the time to look more in depth at the illustrations and text of the book. I met with him there not long ago, and he showed me some photographs he had taken of Brown in 1952, when she was living at a summer house that she had bought on the nearby island of Vinalhaven. A rabbit child is going to sleep, a grandmother rabbit watches and some kittens play on the rug by the fire.

He tended to draw the animals in her stories in profile, and, in these works, one can trace the evolution of his pictorial style. Goodnight Moon deals explicitly with the "here and now" of a child's bedtime—all the physical items that make up a bedroom from telephones to socks with a focus on the single, simple act of saying "goodnight. Through the years, “Goodnight Moon” has been imitated dozens of times; picture books aimed at helping children fall asleep are so common that they have spawned parodies, including the 2011 best-seller “ Go the Fuck to Sleep.Earlier the same year she had met James Stillman “Pebble” Rockefeller Junior at a party, and they became engaged. Brown’s close friend and frequent collaborator, Clement Hurd—who also illustrated her classic Runaway Bunny—is responsible for the stark, saturated, and slightly absurdist illustrations in Goodnight Moon.