The middle child of three whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, Margaret was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 23, 1910. In 1923, she attended a boarding school in Switzerland while her parents were living in India and Connecticut. Only a few years after, Margaret attended a school in New York instead. She began attending a school in Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics.
After graduation in 1928, Brown went to Virginia for college. Following her graduation with in 1932, Margaret worked as a teacher and also studied art.
She started writing books for children while working at a school in New York City. The school promoted a new approach to children's education and literature, emphasizing the real world and the "here and now." This philosophy and her hero, the poet Gertrude Stein, influenced her work.
Margaret's first published children's book was
When the Wind Blew in 1937. She went on to develop her
Here and Now stories, and later the
Noisy Book series while employed as the first editor of a New York-based publisher. As editor, one of Margaret's first projects was to recruit contemporary authors to write children's books for the company. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Gertrude Stein accepted the offer. Stein's book,
The World is Round, was considered "perhaps the first modern board book for babies."
In 1952 while on a book tour in France, she died at 42 of an embolism shortly after suffering from appendicitis. Kicking up her leg to show the doctor how well she was feeling caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge and travel to her heart. By the time of Margaret's death, she had authored well over one hundred books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House" in Maine.
