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This article is about the children's book, Goodnight Moon. For the Shivaree song, see Goodnight Moon (song).

Goodnight Moon is a children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. It was first published in 1947, and is a highly acclaimed example of a bedtime story. The content depicts the process of a little one saying goodnight to everything around: "Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light, and the red balloon..."

Goodnight Moon is considered a classic in children's literature. The book is a poem, written in a simple rhyme form. It contains illustrations of many objects familiar to a child, including a recurring mouse. Part of the activity of reading this book is identifying these objects in the illustrations. As the book progresses, the room depicted gets continuously darker, the moon rises higher in the sky, and the time on the clock gets later.

Readers familiar with Wise Brown's other works may notice that on the fifth spread, one of the paintings on the wall is actually a drawing from The Runaway Bunny. There is also a copy of The Runaway Bunny on the bookshelf and a copy of Goodnight Moon on the nightstand.

It is published in a board book edition, a book whose pages are actually stiff cardboard to make it suitable to give to a very young child. It is also published in a "jumbo" edition, suitable for use with large groups.

In 2005, publisher HarperCollins digitally altered the photograph of Hurd, which had been on the book for at least twenty years, to remove a cigarette.^[1] Kate Jackson, editor in chief for children's books, said "It is potentially a harmful message to very young kids." 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." ^[2] HarperCollins has said it will likely replace the picture with a different, unaltered photo of Hurd in future editions. In response, a satirical article demanded the removal of other potentially dangerous objects in the book, such as the fireplace and balloon (a choke hazard for young children).

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Brown bequeathed the royalties to the book (among many others) to Albert Clarke, the son of a neighbor who was nine years old when she died. In 2000, reporter Joshua Prager detailed in the Wall Street Journal the troubled life of Mr. Clarke who has squandered the millions of dollars the book has earned him and who believes that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss. ^[4]