I volunteered at the local library every summer when I was a teenager.
This was not originally my idea. Given my druthers, I would have been perfectly content to spend the summer reading, doing embroidery, sleeping, working my way through the Lensman series, napping, rewatching Star Trek, dogsitting for the neighbors, writing fanfiction, and not getting up until it was time for lunch.
My mother, not wishing to raise a human slug, had other ideas. “You need to get out of the house. Go to the library,” she said, and after a regretful look at my wee bed, I obeyed. Mum was a teacher, after all, with plenty of experience wrangling reluctant teenagers. When she said “do this,” one did, and that was all there was to it.
So off I went to the Pleasant Hills Public Library, first to read the books, then to shelve the books, and finally to assist the children’s librarian as needed. It was not a large place — it had begun as a couple of rooms at the borough fire station, eventually taking over the whole building, and no, I am not making this up — and I quickly made friends with the library staff. The collection was on the small size due to space restrictions but included some fascinating and unexpected items; they had a charter subscription to Ms., for instance, as well as the records of a public hearing in the early 1970’s in New York state from women testifying on the need for safe abortions. There was also a decent selection of science fiction and mysteries, some good history books, and a very good children’s room in the basement.
I was well past actually reading children’s books by then; like many bright children I’d skipped directly from the likes of Danny Dunn and the Amazing Electric Chipmunk of Mars to Murder on the Orient Express and other books intended for adults. I enjoyed flipping through the books in the children’s room as I shelved them, though, especially after I discovered that some of the older science fiction collection had migrated downstairs as tastes changed and the field evolved past space opera and gee-gosh-wow-they-built-a-SPACESHIP-IN-THEIR-GARAGE pulp. I also became at least acquainted with all the books I’d vaulted past when my aunt and mother began passing their old mysteries on to me, although there still quite a few children’s classics I’ve never read and never will.
It was a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon, and I’m sure my mother appreciated having a few hours to herself for a change. One thing neither of us questioned, though, was the existence of a separate children’s room, stocked solely with literature deemed suitable for children and supervised by someone with specialized training in seeing to the literary needs of immature humans.
For that we must thank one of the great unsung figures in America letters: Anne Carroll Moore.
Moore, the only surviving daughter of an attorney and sometime legislator, was born in Maine during the first Grant administration. An intelligent and much-loved child, she deeply admired her father and was on track to go to law school herself until the deaths of her parents made that financially impossible. She then spent several years helping a widowed brother raise his children until he suggested she become a librarian. Whether he did this out of love for his sister or a desire to get her out of the house before frustration at having her career plans scuppered made life unbearable isn’t clear, but by the mid-1890’s she’d headed off to New York to enroll at the Pratt Institute’s one-year library course.
Librarians were just starting to professionalize around then, and libraries themselves were transitioning from solemn, quiet spaces devoted mainly to scholarship and fine literature to public institutions that served the entire populace. Moore, intelligent and driven, attended a lecture calling for libraries to have dedicated spaces where young patrons could read, listen to stories, and become lifelong learners under the dedicated eye of specially trained professionals.
She liked what she heard, and when the Pratt offered her a job to organize a children’s section of their own library, she agreed. Soon their children’s library boasted child-sized tables, a fine selection of quality books, and a full slate of programming such as summer reading clubs, puppet shows, story times, and other events aimed at the very youngest readers. Other libraries followed suit, and within a decade Moore was appointed to supervise the newly created Children’s Room at the New York Public Library, as well as manage the programming and approve the books purchased for the children’s rooms at branches throughout the Five Boroughs.
To say that Moore succeeded well beyond anyone’s expectations is putting it mildly. Under her direction the NYPL quickly became the gold standard for children’s libraries across the country, instituting story times, inclusive programming celebrating the many immigrant groups that flocked to the city, and lists of high quality children’s books distributed throughout the country. Her insistence on what she called the Four Respects (respect for children, respect for children’s books, respect for one’s co-workers, and respect for children’s librarians) helped children be taken seriously as patrons and their librarians as working professionals in their own right.
Within three years, Moore’s policies had not only improved the quality of children’s books and raised the status of children’s librarians, they had raised the standing of the library itself; fully one third of all books checked out of the NYPL system were children’s books, many by immigrant families thrilled to see that Moore was dedicated to providing “children of foreign parentage a feeling of pride in the beautiful things of the country [their] parents have left” instead of insisting they read only books by English-speaking authors. She also hired the first Puerto Rican and first African-American children’s librarians in the NYPL system, on the grounds that librarians should reflect the communities they served and be able to relate to them.
Moore’s success soon led to her becoming a popular lecturer, writer, and book reviewer, as well as a mentor to several generations of children’s librarians who ensured that her ideas would be put into practice in their own libraries. A visit to England led to her meeting noted authors such as Beatrix Potter and Walter de la Mare, and Moore took great pride in introducing their work to the American public. She even wrote two children’s books herself about “Nicholas Knickerbocker,” a wooden Dutch doll that she kept on her desk and used during her lectures. Her imprimatur could make an author’s career, and all too often did.
All too often that sort of power will go to even the best-intentioned person’s head. Anne Carroll Moore was no exception. She was so convinced that she and she alone knew what was best for small minds led to whatever she didn’t like being excluded from award consideration, or sometimes even from being purchased as all. She did not like series books, period, and though she might have been justified in scorning formulaic offerings from the Stratemeyer Syndicate, she lumped L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumley Thompson’s Wizard of Oz books in with the likes of Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue. The entire children’s staff except Moore herself hated “Nicholas Knickerbocker” as cloying and obnoxious (especially when she would lecture erring staff members in Nicholas’ voice while holding up the doll in front of them), and rejoiced when she accidentally left him in a cab one day. And even though she hand-picked her successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, when the NYPL forced her to retire at age 70 in 1941, she was still such a dominant force that Sayers found it all but impossible to make any significant changes, or even hold an allegedly closed staff meeting without Moore tracking down the location and barging in to run things.
Worst of all, Moore could, and sometimes did, kill entire careers. She had a stamp made up that read “Not Recommended for Purchase by Expert” that she reserved for books she did not like or approve of, and librarians across the country figured that if the great Miss Moore of the NYPL didn’t think a book was worth buying, well, that was good enough for them. Writers did everything they could to avoid the GIANT STAMP O’DOOM marring their own books, and well into the 1930’s were still churning out stories that followed her preference for folklore of various types, wholesome families, and good old-fashioned fun. After all, one of the Nicholas Knickerbocker books had been a Newbery Honor Book so clearly Moore she knew what she was talking about, right?
Right?
Tonight I bring you two books that are not bad by any measure, but were so hated by Anne Carroll Moore that she actively attempted to suppress one and nearly succeeded in burying the second. They are scarcely the only books she and her disciples disliked - she was no fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder because (horrors!) she wrote a series - but they stand out as being pretty much the opposite of what she claimed they were:
Stuart Little, by E.B. White — E.B. White is one of the best American writers of the twentieth century, and no, for once I am not exaggerating. His beautifully lucid essays, letters, and prose pieces set the standard for modern non-fiction, and his marvelous portrait of his adopted hometown, Here is New York, continues to shape the image of what Lin-Manuel Miranda called “the greatest city in the world” decades later.
His influence extended well beyond his work as an essayist. White, known to his friends by his college nickname “Andy,” married The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Katherine S. White, and helped mentor her son, baseball writer and journalist Roger Angell. The Whites shaped the careers of literally an entire generation of magazine writers, novelists, and short story writers, to the point that it’s hard to imagine what modern American prose would look like without them.
And oh yeah, E.B. White also wrote a trio of children’s books, one good, the other two all-time classics.
The one that was merely good, The Trumpet of the Swan, was written in the 1960’s and is more of an afterthought to White’s career than anything else. I read it when it first came out and liked it, but if it had been written by anyone else it would have gone down as enjoyable but not particularly memorable.
The other two, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web*....well. Those were another matter entirely.
Stuart Little was not published until the fall of 1945, but the idea that led to the book was a dream White had in 1926 about a mouse-like, mouse-sized boy. He then wrote a series of stories about the character for his multitudinous nieces and nephews, tucked them into a drawer, and poked at them occasionally but not seriously for the next couple of decades. Part of him knew that there was something there worth pursuing, but he didn’t actually finish the book until years later. The episodic result, which chronicles Stuart’s adventures (sailing a ship on the pond in Central Park, fighting off a home invasion, setting out on a road trip to find his beloved Margalo), mesmerized and frustrated me when I was a child, and it’s only now, as an adult, that I realize the book is as much a novel about the endless journey of our lives as the story of a single individual.
Regardless, Stuart Little is a fascinating, amusing, utterly unique book, and one I can’t wait to share with my honorary grandniece in a couple of years.
Anne Carroll Moore hated it.
This wasn’t because she disliked either E.B. White or his work. Far from it. She had begun cultivating the Whites in the late 1930’s after Katherine White, who reviewed children’s books for The New Yorker, asked for advice on beefing up the children’s section at the library in North Brooklin, Maine, where the Whites had purchased a farm. Moore agreed, and quickly realized that a) Andy White was one of the best writers in the country, b) he had the talent to write perfectly splendid children’s books, and c) the person who convinced him to do so and shepherded his work to publication would be certain to share in the resultant glory. Anne Carroll Moore might not have been much of a writer herself, but she recognized quality when she saw it, and she wanted to be the catalyst for what was certain to be an instant classic.
She had to wait a while for White to finish his masterpiece. Although he occasionally mentioned writing children’s books in a column he wrote for Harper’s, he also had his work at the The New Yorker, an active career as a freelancer, the farm to run, a stepson in the Army Air Corps to worry about, and a boy of his own to raise. It wasn’t until the war was winding down that he finally managed to whip the tales that had delighted his young relatives into something long enough to publish.
Soon word began circulating that E.B. White’s long-awaited children’s book was finally, finally, finally complete. Better, his editor was so convinced of its quality that Harper & Row had ordered an initial printing of 50,000 copies, which is well above average today and was “automatic best seller” territory in the days when war-time paper rationing had just begun to ease. Literary New York was abuzz, and Anne Carroll Moore, who had what we now call “connections” in the publishing industry, managed to get her hands on an advance copy.
Which, as noted above, she hated. “I was never so disappointed with a book in my life,” she lamented, then claimed that Stuart Little was so bad it would irrevocably destroy White’s reputation. It’s not hard to see why she was nonplussed — Stuart Little is more a series of anecdotes than an actual novel, it’s set in modern New York, there’s no villain unless you count Snowbell the cat, and the ending is much closer to “The Lady or the Tiger?” than to the usual good-triumphs-over-evil- thanks-to-pluck-luck-and-good-morals finale that still dominates books for kidlets. There wasn’t a trace of the folklore, whimsy, or eternal verities that Moore expected in a good book, and the fact that Stuart Little is charming, frequently hilarious, and written in White’s usual flawless prose did not matter. Stuart Little was not worthy of its author, and if White and his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, did not realize it, well, they needed to be set straight post-haste.
This is why Moore, who was still the most powerful figure in children’s letters despite age and (technical) retirement, embarked on an unprecedented campaign to get Harper’s to withdraw the book. She badmouthed Stuart Little o any and everyone she spoke to, then summoned White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, to a meeting at her home so she could very politely but very definitely order Nordstrom to tell White “oops, my bad” and cancel the book. “It mustn’t be published,” she said, and that Nordstrom managed to tell her “no” and make it stick says much about her intestinal fortitude.
At which point Moore decided to stop bullying other people and wrote directly to the Whites demanding that Stuart Little be withdrawn.
The original fourteen page letter (!!!) does not survive — the Whites read it, were duly appalled, and promptly junked it — but an enterprising researcher managed to dredge up a six page draft that by itself would have destroyed Moore’s reputation if the Whites had been cagey enough to leak it to one of the gossip columns. In it she accused White of blurring fantasy and reality so badly that the poor innocent children of America would not be able to tell the difference, then finished with a veiled threat to use her dreaded GIANT RUBBER STAMP O’DOOM on the book: “I fear ‘Stuart Little’ will be very difficult to place in libraries and schools over the country.”
White himself later claimed that Moore also implied that anyone who’d write a book like Stuart Little had a “sick mind” but without the original text we will never know.
We do know that Katherine White took it upon herself to respond on behalf of herself and her husband, who was both annoyed and puzzled by Moore’s vehemence. She refused to let him read her reply, leading him to speculate that it probably “set a new world’s record for poisoned courtesy,” but the actual letter comes across as more in sorrow than in anger; Katherine White pointed out that the book had begun as a dream, just like the beloved classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, defended it as enjoyable and appropriate for the classroom, and ended with a slightly plaintive “Didn’t you think it even funny?”
Moore, whose set of unwritten rules for children’s books was compared by Andy White to the rigidity of those for lawn tennis, did not. She gave Stuart Little a bad review when it came out, continued to pressure her disciples not to order the book for their libraries, and exerted enough influence to keep it from serious award consideration even though it was a smash hit, selling over 100,000 copies and prompting E.B. White to invite Ursula Nordstrom to a lunch where
“You can eat 100,000 stalks of celery and I’ll swallow 100,000 olives. It will be the E. B. White-Ursula Nordstrom Book and Olive Luncheon.”
Fortunately for everyone involved, this horrifying and very clever pun did not make it into print until the 1977 publication of E.B. White’s collected letters, but it does suggest that despite having the most powerful children’s librarian in the country basically accuse him of mental illness while trying to get his book banned, he most definitely got the last laugh.*
Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown — how anyone, at any time, in any place, could possibly object to this gentle bedtime story is a true mystery. This quiet, spare, almost lyrical portrayal of a little bunny wishing their toys, bedroom, and even the great round Moon in the sky a good night is just about perfect for helping active children wind down for a restful sleep. The illustrations are as lovely and low-key as the prose, even the tiny mouse and the bowl of mush, and who wouldn’t want a guardian like the old lady saying “hush” to keep the watch against the creatures of the night? There are some books that truly deserve their status as classics, and Goodnight Moon is one of them.
So why didn’t Anne Carroll Moore agree?
One reason was the author. Margaret Wise Brown, a Hollins alumna, had the college education that Moore had craved but never obtained, plus had worked extensively with the progressive Bank Street School to develop a curriculum based on how children actually viewed the world instead of how adults thought they did. Bank Street based its view of childhood on extensive research into child development, and Brown was a firm believer that children’s books should be written on a level that youngsters could actually understand and appreciate. This sort of realism was anathema to Moore, who continued to prefer the old-fashioned view of children as dear little darlings who should be raised on a steady diet of wholesome, inoffensive, traditional folk tales and legends.
Then there was Brown’s personal life. Like Moore, she never married, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, or for romantic partners. She’d been engaged for a short period in college, where she was known by the unusual nickname “Tim” because her sandy blonde hair was the color of a stalk of timothy. She’d gone on to have at least two strong romantic relationships with men in her youth, but by the time she published Goodnight Moon in 1947, she was quietly living with the love of her life, a wealthy feminist and socialite named Blanche Oelrichs, in what earlier generations politely called a “Boston marriage.”
Oelrichs, who had previously been married to actor John Barrymore, had written erotic poetry under the pseudonym “Michael Strange,” was an avowed Communist, and had been a prominent member of American First isolationist movement until Hitler invaded her beloved USSR. Her relationship with Brown was no secret — Brown had moved into Oelrichs’ home in the East 70’s in 1943 and lived there until Oelrichs’ death in 1950 — and it’s hard to imagine that the prim, proper Miss Moore would have approved of any children’s writer with such a checkered past and inappropriate relationship.
Even so, there is absolutely nothing in Goodnight Moon itself that could offend anyone. The main characters are two bunnies, the family kittens, and the little mouse that keeps popping up, which should have appealed to the fantasy-loving Moore. The setting could be any child’s bedroom, and the adult bunny could be a mother, grandmother, nanny, nurse, or auntie. There’s no politics, no hint of radicalism, feminism, or Boston marriages, and the only discordant note is that the kittens seemingly don’t notice (or care) that there’s a mouse darting about. Brown was so concerned about keeping the book as non-political and inoffensive as possible that she asked her illustrator, Clement Hurd, to alter a painting of a cow jumping over the moon in the little child’s bedroom to de-emphasize the cow’s udder. Unless one has deep-rooted psychological trauma stemming from elderly women saying “hush” to restless children, this book is about as harmless and wholesome as it gets.
This made no difference to Moore. The New York Public Library would only say that Goodnight Moon was “unbearably sentimental,” not that such a respectable institution could possibly have issued a press release hinting that they were not purchasing the book because the author believed in progressive education, had had at least one affair with a married man, and now lived in perversion and sin with a rich female ex-Communist in a luxurious Upper East Side apartment.
Regardless of the exact reason, the NYPL’s disapproval was enough to limit initial sales of Good Night Moon to around 6,000 copies. It was a marginal title at best until the rise of chain bookstores like Waldenbooks, Borders, and Barnes & Noble led parents to find the book on their own, buy it, and read it to their own children decades later, long after Brown herself had died of a freak embolism.
The NYPL itself eventually admitted that that this time their Experts had blown it. Goodnight Moon finally arrived behind the lions in 1972, and eager parents began checking it out almost immediately. The sole reason it wasn’t on their recent list of most checked out books of the twentieth century was because it wasn’t available for twenty-five years, but it’s all but certain that the twenty-first century will be a very different story.
*Note: Anne Carroll disliked Charlotte’s Web nearly as much as she’d hated Stuart Little, partly for once again mixing fantasy and realism, partly because she somehow got it into her head that Fern, the little farmgirl who bottle raises Wilbur, was the main character. This unique interpretation caused her to complain that Fern was “undeveloped” and ignore the actual story, which of course is all about Charlotte and Wilbur’s friendship and Charlotte’s efforts to save Wilbur from becoming a couple of pork chops, several rashers of nicely smoked bacon, and that all-time favorite, baby back ribs…..
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Have you ever heard of Anne Carroll Moore? Read anything by E.B. White or Margaret Wise Brown? Attempted to read one of her Nicholas Knickerbocker stories? Found of her books shoved behind the paneling in your knotty pine rumpus room? It’s a chilly night at the Last Homely Shack, so pour yourself a hot cider and share….
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