Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon (1947) and The Runaway Bunny (1942), both illustrated by Clement Hurd.

She was initially raised in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and later attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923,[4][5] while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut.

[citation needed] Brown was an avid, lifelong beagler and was noted for her ability to keep pace, on foot, with the hounds.

Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Brown's hero, Gertrude Stein, accepted the offer.

[11] Brown and Hurd later teamed on the children's book classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, published by Harper.

[citation needed] The New York Public Library initially banned Goodnight Moon due to the influence of retired librarian Anne Carrol Moore, who reportedly "hated" the book.

[12] From 1944 to 1946, Doubleday published three picture books written by Brown under the pseudonym "Golden MacDonald" (coopted from her friend's handyman)[7] and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard.

[13] She dated, for some time, an unknown "good, quiet man from Virginia",[14] had a long-running affair with William Gaston,[15][16] and had a summer romance with Preston Schoyer.

[17] In the summer of 1940, Brown began a long-term relationship with Blanche Oelrichs (pen name Michael Strange), poet/playwright, actress, and the former wife of John Barrymore.

[21] A 2022 profile in the New Yorker, entitled "The Radical Woman Behind 'Goodnight Moon'", featured a trip through Brown's "Only House" island cottage in Vinalhaven, Maine, which still retains elements of her picture books.

[21]Brown bequeathed the royalties to many of her books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny to Albert Clarke, the son of a neighbor who was nine years old when she died.

In 2000, reporter Joshua Prager detailed in The Wall Street Journal the troubled life of Clarke, who squandered the millions of dollars the books had earned him and who believed that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss.

In 1991, a future biographer, Amy Gary of WaterMark Inc., rediscovered the paper-clipped bundles, more than 500 typewritten pages in all, and set about getting the stories published.

Claudia H. Pearson published a Freudian analysis of Brown's "classic series" of bunny books, entitled Have a Carrot (Look Again Press, 2010).