6. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (summer 1934), Letter 3, Fishburn.
7. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (fall 1934), Letter 4, Fishburn.
8. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (fall 1934), Letter 7, Fishburn.
9. MWB paraphrased in Bruce Bliven, Jr., “Child’s Best Seller,” Life, 2 December 1946, 60.
10. MWB, “In Ten Years,” unpublished typescript, undated, Rockefeller.
11. Handwritten notation by MWB’s instructor, Helen Hull, Rockefeller.
12. Inez Camprubi Mabon, interview with author, Greenwich, Conn., 29 January 1985.
13. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (fall 1934), Letter 4, Fishburn.
14. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, 31 December 1934, Letter 15, Fishburn. The quotation from Chaucer is from E. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modem Reader (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1958), 905. The modern English rendering is by the author.
15. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (fall 1934), Letter 4, Fishburn.
16. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (November 1934), Letter 6, Fishburn.
17. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (November 1934), Letter 4, Fishburn.
18. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, 31 December 1934, Letter 15, Fishburn.
19. Dorothy Wagstaff Ripley, interview with author, Litchfield, Conn., 3 June 1987.
20. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (spring 1935), Letter 2, Fishburn.
21. Elizabeth Lamb, interview with author, East Hampton, N.Y., 10 April 1984.
22. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (spring 1935), Letter 2, Fishburn.
23. Edith Thacher Hurd, interview with author, Starksboro, Vt., 14 July 1982.
24. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, “Pioneering in Education,” an oral history conducted in 1960 by Irene Prescott, Regional Cultural History Project, The General Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1962, 155.
25. Ibid., 13.
26. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 119–20.
27. William James, Talks to Teachers (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1958), 104.
28. Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 113.
29. Ibid., 139–58.
30. Lucy Sprague Mitchell et al., “The Working Background of Harriet Johnson’s Contribution to Education,” Schools Begin at Two: A Book for Teachers and Parents, ed. Barbara Biber (New York: Agathon Press, 1970), xv.
31. Bank Street observer notes, Box 7, Lucy Sprague Mitchell Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University (collection hereafter cited as Columbia).
32. Mitchell, Two Lives, 281.
33. Ibid., 279.
34. Mitchell et al., Another Here and Now Story Book, illustrated by Rosalie Slocum (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937), 30.
35. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, introduction to 1921 edition, Here and Now Story Book, 2d ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948), 25.
36. Obituary of Anne Carroll Moore, New York Herald Tribune, 21 January 1961.
37. Randall Jarrell, “A Verse Chronicle,” Poetry and the Age (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 151.
38. Anne Carroll Moore, “About Nicholas,” undated typescript, New York Public Library Office of Children’s Services, New York, N. Y.
39. Anne Carroll Moore, Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story (New York: Putnam, 1924), 3.
40. Religious leaders, moralists, and philosophers had all entered into the fray at one time or another. Since the turn of the century, as the critic Josette Frank observed, psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, and librarians had become the principal participants in the old debate over whether fairy tales might “confuse children’s understanding” of the world or be otherwise harmful to them. “Did fairy tales offer easy wish-fulfillment escape from reality? Should not young children’s books tell them about the things and people of their real world? There were ardent protagonists on both sides of these questions.” Josette Frank, “The Child Study Children’s Book Committee: Its History and Purpose,” undated typescript, in the collection of the late Josette Frank.
41. Harold Ordway Rugg, review of Here and Now Story Book, Journal of Educational Psychology (March 1922): 186–87; Arnold and Beatrice Gesell, review of Here and Now Story Book, New York Post Literary Review, November 1921, 164.
42. James, Talks to Teachers, 73.
43. P. Korchien, student evaluation of Margaret Brown, 25 April 1936, Bank Street Records, Milbank Memorial Library, Teachers College, Columbia University (collection hereafter cited as Milbank).
44. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (spring 1936), Letter 2, Fishburn.
45. Ralph Pearson, student evaluation, 12 December 1935, Milbank.
46. MWB, “The Sudden Impact of Smell in an Autumn Field,” unpublished manuscript, undated, Rockefeller.
47. Bank Street observer notes headed “J—S—, roof, 4-30-37,” Box 7, Columbia.
48. Barbara Biber, telephone interview with author, 28 December 1981.
49. Dorothy Stall, “Report on Margaret Brown, student teacher at Little Red School House,” 8 January 1936, Milbank.
50. The Book of Knowledge (1951), 79.
51. Lucy Sprague Mitchell to Louise Seaman Bechtel, 27 May 1941, Columbia.
52. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, student evaluation of MWB, 10 December 1935, Milbank.
53. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, student evaluation of MWB, 11 April 1936, Milbank.
54. MWB, Bank Street student notebook, Westerly.
55. The Book of Knowledge (1951), 79.
56. MWB, Bank Street student notebook, Westerly.
57. Mitchell, Two Lives, 155.
58. Edith Thacher Hurd, 14 July 1982.
59. Sarah Kerlin, interview with author, New York, N.Y., 11 October 1982.
60. Sarah Kerlin, 11 October 1982.
CHAPTER THREE Bank Street and Beyond
1. Lucy Sprague Mitchell to John Macrae, Sr., 3 June 1936, E. P. Dutton Records, George Arents Research Library for Special Collections at Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. (collection hereafter cited as Dutton Records).
2. Mitchell et al., Another Here and Now Story Book, 1–12. Recognizing that children do not all develop at the same rate, Mitchell preferred to think of the categories she had devised as a developmental sequence of “maturity levels,” rather than as age levels in a strict chronological sense. Also of interest in this connection is the fact that Another Here and Now Story Book contains material graded for up to the six-year-old level. The earlier book ranged a bit higher, to seven. This slight narrowing of scope probably reflected Mitchell’s increasing flexibility as to the appropriateness of fairy tale and fantasy literature for the younger ages.
3. Mitchell, foreword to Another Here and Now Story Book, xxiii–xiv.
4. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (fall 1936), Letter 18, Fishburn.
5. Jessica Gamble Dunham, interview with author, Tucson, Arizona, 17 April 1984.
6. Edmund Wilson, “Aladdin’s Lecture Palace,” The American Earthquake (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 200.
7. Jessica Gamble Dunham, 17 April 1984.
8. Sophie Shoumatoff Ward, interview with author, Locust Valley, N.Y., 9 October 1982. Margaret later wrote a series of stories about her black cat with white paws, which were posthumously published in Seven Stories about a Cat Named Sneakers, illustrated by Jean Chariot. (New York: W. R. Scott, 1955).
9. Roberta Brown Rauch, 20 September 1982.
10. Roberta Brown Rauch, telephone interview with author, 24 April 1988.
11. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (February 1937), Letter 1, Fishburn.
12. Louise Raymond, quoted in MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (February 1937), Letter 1, Fishburn.
13. MWB, When the Wind Blew, illustrated by Rosalie Slocum (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
14. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (February 1937), Letter 1, Fishburn.
15. The Book of Knowledge (1951), 80.
16. Roberta Brown Rauch, 23 July 1982.
17. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (postmarked 17 May 1937), Letter 13, Fishburn.
18. Ibid. The passage quoted is from Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1937), 363.
19. This quote from United Press appeared in a Dutton advertisement in Horn Book (September/October 1937).
20. A. T. Eaton, review of Another Here and Now Story Book, New York Times Book Review, 2 May 1937, 10.
21. Time, 31 October 1938, 31. As Lucy Mitchell herself observed in the foreword to the second collection, the influence of the here-and-now approach extended well beyond the immediate circle of her Bank Street students and colleagues: “Now every . . . [publisher’s] list of children’s books shows a larger and larger proportion of this type.” (Mitchell et al., Another Here and Now Story Book, xv.)
22. Bertha E. Mahony, review of Another Here and Now Story Book, Horn Book (May/June 1937): 166.
23. Ibid., Phelps and MWB, “Lucy Sprague Mitchell,” 159.
24. MWB to Lucy Sprague Mitchell, undated (summer 1937), Columbia.
25. MWB to Lucy Sprague Mitchell, undated (summer 1937), Columbia.
26. Joel Chandler Harris, “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, illustrated by A. B. Frost (New York and London: D. Appleton & Co., 1880; revised 1924), 7–8; MWB, “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” Brer Rabbit (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 7.
27. Harris, 9; MWB, 7.
28. Augusta Baker Alexander, interview with author, New York, N.Y., 31 January 1985.
29. MWB, The Fish With the Deep Sea Smile, 16.
30. MWB to Louise Raymond, undated (summer 1937), HarperCollins files, New York, N.Y.
31. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, 18 August 1937, Letter 11, Fishburn.
32. MWB to Louise Raymond, undated (summer 1937), HarperCollins.
33. Louise Raymond to MWB, 18 August 1937, HarperCollins.
34. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, 18 August 1937, Letter 11, Fishburn.
35. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (postmarked 17 May 1937), Letter 13, Fishburn.
36. Bruce Bliven, Jr., 7 August 1984.
37. Anne T. Eaton, review of When the Wind Blew, New York Times Book Review, 3 October 1937, 10; Horn Book (September/October 1937): 283.
38. Bank Street observer notes headed “Words and Meanings,” Box 7, Columbia.
39. Ellen Tarry, interview with author, New York, N.Y., 25 July 1984.
40. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, “Margaret Wise Brown, 1910–1952,” 69 Bank Street (1953): 19.
41. Edith Thacher Hurd, 13 July 1982.
42. Ibid.
43. William R. Scott, interview with author, New York, N.Y., 10 September 1981.
44. MWB, Bumble Bugs and Elephants, illustrated by Clement Hurd (New York: Scott, 1938).
45. Clement Hurd, interview with author, Starksboro, Vt., 13 July 1982.
46. William R. Scott, Inc. catalogue, Fall 1938, quoted in Bader, American Picturebooks, 216.
47. Louise Seaman Bechtel, “The Art of Illustrating Books for the Younger Readers,” Books in Search of Children, ed. Virginia Haviland (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 46. (Reprinted from New York Times Book Review, 10 November 1940.)
48. Esphyr Slobodkina, Notes for a Biographer (Great Neck, N.Y.: Ur-quhart-Slobodkina, 1978), 2:250.
49. Ibid., 427.
50. Ibid., 430.
51. MWB, The Little Fireman, illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina (New York: Scott, 1938).
52. James MacCormick, telephone interview with author, 13 September 1985.
53. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (summer 1938), Letter 19, Fishburn.
54. MWB to Marguerite C. Hearsey, undated (February 1937), Letter 1, Fishburn.
55. MWB to Gertrude Stein, 18 January 1940, Gertrude Stein Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (collection hereafter cited as Beinecke). Material from the Gertrude Stein Collection is published herein by permission of Yale University.
56. John G. McCullough to Gertrude Stein, 2 September 1938, Beinecke.
57. William R. Scott to Gertrude Stein (telegram), 30 September 1938, Beinecke.
58. William R. Scott to Gertrude Stein (telegram), 24 October 1938, Beinecke.
59. Gertrude Stein, The World Is Round, illustrated by Clement Hurd (New York: Scott, 1939), 1.
60. William R. Scott to Gertrude Stein (telegram), 15 November 1938, Beinecke.
61. Bader, American Picturebooks, 236.
62. William R. Scott, 10 September 1981.
63. William R. Scott, 10 September 1981; John G. McCullough, interview with author, North Bennington, Vt., 17 July 1986.
64. Bruce Bliven, Sr. quoted in Myer Kutz, Rockefeller Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 73.
65. Bruce Bliven, Jr., “Fair Tomorrow,” New Republic, 7 December 1938, 119.
66. Phyllis McGinley, “Primary Education,” New Yorker, 14 January 1939. Reprinted by permission; © 1939 (renewed 1967, 1995). All rights reserved.
67. Arnold Gesell, quoted in “Democracy Held Vital to Children,” New York Times, 15 November 1938.
68. “Fund Urged to Aid Brightest Pupils,” New York Times, 12 November 1939.
69. MWB, Bank Street observer notes headed “Trying out the story of Willie Lion on a group of Four Year Olds,” 19 January [1939], Westerly.
70. MWB, “Three Year olds going on Four,” observer notes dated 1 June (1939), Westerly; MWB to Gertrude Stein, 18 January 1940, Stein Papers, Beinecke.
71. MWB, “In the Blackberry Patch,” undated, unpublished typescript, Rockefeller.
72. Louise Seaman Bechtel, review of The Streamlined Pig, by MWB, illustrated by Kurt Wiese, Saturday Review of Literature, 19 November 1938, 18.
CHAPTER FOUR Everywhere and Somewhere
1. John G. McCullough to Gertrude Stein, 8 February 1939, Beinecke.
2. Clement Hurd, 13 July 1982.
3. Leonard Weisgard, 26 October–5 November 1982.
4. MWB, The Noisy Book, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard (New York: Scott, 1939).
5. Stein, World, 2.
6. MWB, “Leonard Weisgard Wins the Caldecott Award,” Publishers’ Weekly (5 July 1947): 42.
7. Stein, World, 18.
8. MWB, Bank Street observer notes, Westerly.
9. MWB, Hollins Alumnae Quarterly class notes (Spring 1939): 31.
10. Stein, World, 63.
11. John G. McCullough, 17 July 1986.
12. John G. McCullough to Gertrude Stein, 16 May 1939, Beinecke.
13. John G. McCullough to Gertrude Stein, summer 1939, Beinecke.
14. John G. McCullough to Gertrude Stein, 22 November 1938, Beinecke.
15. Gertrude Stein to Clement Hurd, undated (spring 1939), Beinecke, reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein; Clement Hurd to Gertrude Stein, 12 July 1939, Beinecke.
16. Leonard Weisgard, 26 October–5 November 1982.
17. Irwin Shaw, “Weep in Years to Come,” Short Stories: Five Decades (New York: Delacorte, 1984), 145. (First published in the New Yorker, 1 July 1939.)
18. Leonard Weisgard, 26 October–5 November 1982.
19. “The Williamsburg Murals: A Rediscovery,” exhibition pamphlet on American Abstract Artists group (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1990).
20. Charles Green Shaw, unpublished diary, 5 May 1939, Charles Green Shaw Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (collection hereafter cited as Smithsonian).
21. Ibid., 6O ctober 1939.
22. Ibid., 9 November 1939.
23. Ibid., 14 December 1939.
24. Ellen Lewis Buell, review of The World Is Round, New York Times Book Review, 12 November 1939, 10.
25. M. L. Becker, review of The World Is Round
, Books (24 September 1939): 6.
26. Louise Seaman Bechtel, “Gertrude Stein for Children” (review of The World Is Round), Books in Search of Children, 85. (Reprinted from Horn Book [September/October 1939].)
27. Katharine S. White, review of The World Is Round, New Yorker, 25 November 1939, 84.
28. Quoted in Edith Thacher Hurd, “The World Is Not Square,” afterword to Gertrude Stein, The World Is Round, illustrated by Clement Hurd (Berkeley, California: North Point Press, 1988), 147.
29. Anne Carroll Moore, “Three Owls’ Notebook,” Horn Book (September/October 1939): 294.
30. MWB to Gertrude Stein, 18 January 1940, Beinecke.
31. MWB, “New York: The Melting Pot of Good Cuisine,” undated typed proposal, collection of Leonard Weisgard.
32. MWB to Cipi Pinellis at Vogue, 7 February 1940, collection of Leonard Weisgard.
33. William R. Scott to MWB, 22 April 1940, Rockefeller.
34. Ursula Nordstrom, 7 March 1981.
35. Ursula Nordstrom to Marc Simont, 25 January 1952, HarperCollins.
36. John G. McCullough, 17 July 1986.
37. Edith Thacher Hurd, 14 July 1982; Lucille Ogle, 8 September 1982; Virginia Mathews, telephone interview with author, 1 May 1987.
38. “To do” was never published as a children’s book. The manuscript is in the Stein Collection, Beinecke.
39. MWB, “The Scent,” unpublished typescript, undated, Rockefeller.
40. MWB, “Luncheon,” unpublished typescript, undated, Rockefeller.
41. MWB, untitled, unpublished, undated typescript beginning “It was a strange group that sat down to dinner that night,” Rockefeller.
42. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1921), 123. Michael Strange’s copy is in the house MWB built for her on Vinalhaven.
43. Books of poetry by Michael Strange include: Miscellaneous Poems (New York: M. Kennerley, 1916); Poems (New York: Brentano’s, 1919); Resurrecting Life, illustrated by John Barrymore (New York: Knopf, 1921); and Selected Poems (New York: Brentano’s, 1928). Her play was published as Clair de lune; a play in 6 scenes and 3 acts (New York: Z. & L. Rosenfield, 1921), and as Clair de lune: a play in 2 acts and 6 scenes (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921).
44. Hollis Alpert, The Barrymores (New York: Dial Press, 1964), 214.
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