Ever purchase a copy of the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon?
If so, here’s a story that will break your heart.
Just a few months before Margaret Wise Brown died suddenly from an embolism following emergency surgery in Nice, France, the 42-year-old Brown—who at the time was engaged to a much younger man—drafted a will.
In it, she left the royalties to “Goodnight Moon” (and 68 other titles) to a young boy named Albert Clarke. She had befriended his mother through a colleague at Bank Street and lived near the family on East 71st Street in Manhattan.
Even before Clarke started receiving his inheritance—the first payment, made when he was 21, was $75,000—he had a few run-ins with the law. Ultimately, the constant windfall from the sales of “Goodnight Moon” funded his bad and often illegal behavior—drug possession and attempts to kidnap his own children—setting him up for a life of crime and estrangement from the rest of his family.
