Goodnight Moon

Children’s author Margaret Wise Brown published her short bedtime story Goodnight Moon in 1947, and it has remained a wildly popular, bestselling, often imitated book ever since. It is considered a classic of children’s literature, and marks the transformation of stories from the kind of moralizing carried over from the nineteenth century to the here-and-now storytelling featuring experiences familiar to children’s own lives that became prevalent in the middle of the twentieth century. Brown based her work on her studies at the Bank Street’s Cooperative School for Student Teachers, where she learned about child development and realized how interested young kids were in the “rhythm, sound quality, and patterns of sound,” more even than the meaning of the words themselves.

Goodnight Moon does not have a plot. Instead, it describes the going to bed ritual of a small bunny, who surveys all the objects of its surrounding green room and then bids goodnight to each object in turn. The bunny is being put to bed by an elderly bunny who is not identified as anything other than a “quiet old lady,” but seems to be either a grandmother or a doting and kindly nanny.

The book features a singsong rhythm and a slightly irregular rhyming pattern. The first part is a list of all the objects in the bunny’s room:



In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of
The cow jumping over the moon
And there were three little bears sitting on chairs
And two little kittens
And a pair of mittens
And a little toy house
And a young mouse
And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush
And a quiet old lady who was whispering “hush”

The second part of the book revisits each object, but this time with the objective of saying goodnight to it.

Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Goodnight cow jumping over the moon
Goodnight light
And the red balloon
Goodnight bears
Goodnight chairs
Goodnight kittens
And goodnight mittens
Goodnight clocks
And goodnight socks
Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
Goodnight comb
And goodnight brush
Goodnight nobody
Goodnight mush
And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush”



The book’s third section takes the ritual of saying goodnight out of the room and the house, focusing on the bunny’s world, which is also ready to participate in the bedtime ritual:

Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Goodnight noises everywhere

Goodnight Moon is illustrated by Clement Hurd. The illustrations feature several allusions to The Runaway Bunny, another of Brown’s children’s books. Several transformations take place in the course of the book that are only apparent through the illustrations. For example, we know from the changing hands on the room’s clock that it takes an hour and ten minutes to put the bunny to bed. We can also see the moon growing larger and more pronounced as the bunny gets closer and closer to sleep. Later in his life, Hurd confessed that the reason the characters in the book are bunnies rather than people is that he was better at drawing bunnies.