United States
In an autobiographic sketch prepared for her publishers, Margaret Wise Brown once described her earliest childhood memories. Among them were images of a "city street with high iron gates, a red brick church at the end of the street and the sound of boats on the river"; a recollection of the "painful shy animal dignity with which a child stretches to conform to a strange adult social politeness"; thoughts about death, dreaming, "mysterious clock time," and aging; and a "problem of aesthetics I had why wasn t an airedale s {sic} face beautiful, if it was beautiful to me?"
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The iron gates were those along Milton Street, in the then fashionable section of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Robert and Maude Brown had settled as a newly married couple from Kirk-wood, Missouri, and where five years later, on May 23, 1910, their secondchild, Margaret, was born.
Once a bucolic East River village within easy reach of Manhattan, Greenpoint by the turn of the century had been transformed into an "American Birmingham," a worthy rival to England s industrial leviathan in the variety and quantity of its manufactures and in the declining quality of its air...
-Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown : awakened by the moon