Bookish Broads by Lauren Marino

Author:Lauren Marino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

A child’s own story is a dream, but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.

Born to wealthy parents and raised in Brooklyn and suburban Long Island, she attended Hollins College in Virginia and became a teacher at the progressive Bank Street College of Education,helping to shape the curriculum. She seemed to know what small children wanted as both a writer and children’s book editor, guided in part by her association with Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who founded the Bank Street model of education that nurtured the “whole child.”

It was while teaching that Brown wrote her first story for little ones, When the Wind Blew. She and Mitchell eventually enlisted several writers to put together a collection of children’s stories called Another Here and Now Story Book. This led to Brown launching her own publishing company called William R. Scott, where she became a pivotal figure in the Golden Age of children’s publishing, a progressive movement that created books that appealed specifically to children’s sensibilities and imagination. She wrote more than one hundred books and, as an editor, commissioned countless others, including Gertrude Stein’s children’s book The World Is Round. She used her success and influence to help children’s book writers and illustrators establish and fight for their rights and fair contracts with publishers.

Unlike many of her picture book peers, Brown was a writer first, not an illustrator, and she was the first person to write books specifically for children five and under. She wrote in a musical, rhyming manner and told people that her books came to her in dreams.

A rebel and adventurer, movie-star gorgeous, and absurdly prolific, she had complicated relationships with both men and women, including actor John Barrymore’s ex-wife, the actress Blanche Oelrichs. At the time of Brown’s premature death at age forty-two of an embolism, she was engaged to James Stillman Rockefeller Jr. of, yes, those Rockefellers (and Carnegies too).

Her biographer Amy Gary says that when Brown died there was a treasure trove of “manuscripts and ideas for books that were years ahead of their time” and that, in addition to many other things she learned by studying Brown’s life, ultimately she learned “how to live with awe and to love with abandon.” Just like a child.

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