lit a candle 1h agoMy sister called me in Oaxaca just to tell me, she knew I'd want to know. Good Night, Gorilla was the only book that got my kids to actually fall asleep, every page another animal sneaking along behind the keeper. Funny how a book with almost no words does that much work.
Their story
Peggy Rathmann was an American author and illustrator whose picture books, among them Good Night, Gorilla and the Caldecott Medal winner Officer Buckle and Gloria, became bedtime and classroom favourites for a generation of children. She died on 3 November 2026, aged 73. Margaret Crosby Rathmann was born on 4…
Peggy Rathmann was an American author and illustrator whose picture books, among them Good Night, Gorilla and the Caldecott Medal winner Officer Buckle and Gloria, became bedtime and classroom favourites for a generation of children. She died on 3 November 2026, aged 73.
Margaret Crosby Rathmann was born on 4 March 1953 in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of five children in a close family. A shy, nearsighted child who struggled at first with reading, she found her voice through drawing and loved the black ink work of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Make Way for Ducklings. After Mounds View High School she studied at several colleges before taking a degree in psychology at the University of Minnesota. She began pre-medical studies at Macalester College but realised in a lab class that the medical illustrations interested her far more than the coursework.
She studied commercial art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and fine art in Minneapolis. Drawing stories to entertain her young nieces led her to write a long picture book manuscript, which publishers rejected. Encouraged by her family, she took a children's book class with the author Barbara Bottner, and an assignment from that course became her first book, Ruby the Copycat (1991). Publishers Weekly named her its Most Promising New Author.
She illustrated Bottner's Bootsie Barker Bites (1992) and then produced, for Putnam and the editor Arthur A. Levine, the nearly wordless zoo adventure Good Night, Gorilla (1994) and Officer Buckle and Gloria (1995), the story of a safety officer whose dog steals the show behind his back. It won the 1996 Caldecott Medal. Ten Minutes till Bedtime followed in 1998 and The Day the Babies Crawled Away in 2003. Her books have sold some 15 million copies, and she said she made them partly so she could crack herself up, always hiding something sly happening behind the reader's back.
She married John Wick, a construction foreman who had finished renovating her San Francisco bathroom for free when she ran out of money, in 1996. From 1998 they lived on a 540 acre ranch in Marin County, California, where their regenerative farming work was featured by The New York Times.
Bottner remembered how she took simple class assignments and rang the truth out of them until masterpieces were born. Rathmann's warm, mischievous pictures remain on nursery shelves around the world.
Biography adapted from English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Publishers Weekly and news reports. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Peggy Rathmann
by People Forever
same in our house, the mouse with the tiny banana got my youngest every time