Goodnight Moon

Goodnight Moon is an American children’s book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. It was published on September 3, 1947, and is a highly acclaimed bedtime story.

This book is the second in Brown and Hurd’s “classic series”, which also includes The Runaway Bunny and My World. The three books have been published together as a collection titled Over the Moon.[1]

Illustrator Clement Hurd said in 1983 that initially the book was to be published using the pseudonym “Memory Ambrose” for Brown, with his illustrations credited to “Hurricane Jones”.[2]

Goodnight Moon had poor initial sales: only 6,000 copies were sold upon initial release in fall 1947. Anne Carroll Moore, the influential children’s librarian at the New York Public Library (NYPL), regarded it as “overly sentimental”. The NYPL and other libraries did not acquire it at first.[3] During the post-World War II Baby Boom years, it slowly became a bestseller. Annual sales grew from about 1,500 copies in 1953 to almost 20,000 in 1970;[3] by 1990, the total number of copies sold exceeded 4 million.[4] As of 2007, the book sells about 800,000 copies annually[5] and by 2017 had cumulatively sold an estimated 48 million copies.[6] Goodnight Moon has been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Catalan, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Hmong, and German.[citation needed]

Brown, who died in 1952, bequeathed the royalties to the book (among many others) to Albert Clarke, who was the nine-year-old son of a neighbor when Brown died. Clarke, who squandered the millions of dollars the book earned him, believed that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss.[7]

In 2005, publisher HarperCollins digitally altered the photograph of illustrator Hurd, which had been on the book for at least twenty years, to remove a cigarette. Its editor-in-chief for children’s books, Kate Jackson, said, “It is potentially a harmful message to very young [children].” HarperCollins had the reluctant permission of Hurd’s son, Thacher Hurd, but the younger Hurd said the photo of Hurd with his arm and fingers extended, holding nothing, “looks slightly absurd to me”.[8] HarperCollins has said it will likely replace the picture with a different, unaltered photo of Hurd in future editions.[needs update][citation needed]