A Hamburg childhood
Margarete Elisabeth Waldstein was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 16, 1906, the daughter of Gertrude Rosenfeld Waldstein and Felix Waldstein, a member of the German parliament, the Reichstag. She grew up in Hamburg's Jewish community. At her older sister's sixteenth birthday party she met a young man from the same circle, Hans Reyersbach, who would one day be her husband and creative partner.
She was independent and adventurous from the start. In the late 1920s she studied art at the Bauhaus in Dessau, the famous school of modern design, then at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and the University of Munich. Her first job was as a reporter and advertising copywriter in Berlin, and she exhibited her watercolors there. She also worked as a photographer.
The Bauhaus taught that art and design should be part of everyday life and open to everyone, not reserved for galleries. That idea fits the work she would later do: books made for the youngest readers, sold cheaply, read aloud at bedtime and passed from one child to the next until they fell apart.
Leaving Germany
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, life for German Jews quickly became dangerous. Margarete left, first for London and then, in 1935, for Rio de Janeiro, where she looked up Hans Reyersbach, the Hamburg family friend who was working for a relative's import business there. The two started a small advertising agency and married in 1935. They took the shorter name Rey, and she became Margret.
In Rio she worked as a photographer, and the couple built what Encyclopedia.com describes as Brazil's first advertising agency. Margret wrote the copy and Hans drew the pictures, a division of labor that would carry over into their children's books.
In 1936 the couple moved to Paris and settled in Montmartre. Hans drew and Margret wrote. A French publisher commissioned a picture book from Hans, Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys (1939), and one mischievous monkey in it was so appealing that the Reys decided to give him his own story.
Flight from Paris
In June 1940 the German army was closing in on Paris. The Reys, as Jews, had to leave at once, but there was no transport. Hans built two bicycles from parts, and the couple rode out of the city only hours before it fell, carrying a few belongings and their picture-book manuscripts, among them the story of the little monkey.
The road south was crowded with refugees. At one point French police held the couple on suspicion of being spies; they were released after officers examined their bundles of papers and found picture books about a monkey.
On June 20, 1940, in Bayonne, they obtained visas issued under the authority of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul who defied his government's orders to save thousands of refugees. They sold their bicycles at the Spanish border, took a train to Lisbon, sailed to Brazil and arrived in New York in October 1940. Margret became an American citizen in 1946.
The voice of Curious George
Houghton Mifflin accepted Curious George almost immediately, and it was published in 1941. Margret wrote the texts and Hans drew the pictures, though both insisted that they shared every stage of the work. She sometimes even acted out the monkey's poses for Hans to draw. The story of a good little monkey who was always curious became a classic, and six more original adventures followed through 1966.
For many years the covers carried only Hans's name. The publisher reportedly worried that there were already too many women writing children's books. Later editions corrected this, and Margret now receives full credit as co-creator. Her plain, funny, rhythmic sentences are a large part of why the books work so well as first readers: children can follow them, predict them and eventually read them on their own.
Books that help children
The Curious George books show a small character who makes mistakes, faces the consequences, and is helped and forgiven. That pattern gave children a safe way to think about their own mistakes and fears. Curious George Goes to the Hospital (1966), created in collaboration with the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, walks young readers through an X-ray, an operation and a stay on a children's ward. It won the Child Study Association of America's Children's Book Award and has eased the fear of hospital visits for many children and their parents.
By the time of Margret's death the series had sold more than 20 million copies in a dozen languages, and George had become one of the best-known characters in children's literature, later reaching new generations through films and a long-running animated television series.
The books also traveled. In Britain, where King George VI was on the throne when they first appeared, the monkey was renamed Zozo to avoid any hint of disrespect. In 1998 a collector's edition restored the original watercolor illustrations that the Reys had carried out of France, letting readers see the pictures as they were first painted in Paris.
Carrying the work forward
Hans died in 1977. Margret continued alone. From 1978 to 1984 she taught creative writing at Brandeis University near Boston. Beginning in 1980 she worked with Alan Shalleck on a series of short animated films about George and on more than two dozen new books based on them. She protected the character fiercely: in 1993 she won a lawsuit against a company that had licensed Curious George videos without the Reys' permission.
Margret's partnership with Alan Shalleck brought George to television. The short animated films they made were first shown in the United States in 1984 on the children's channel Nickelodeon and later on the Disney Channel, and the more than two dozen books adapted from them introduced George to a new generation of preschoolers. After her death, Universal Studios acquired the licensing rights in 1997 and produced a feature film in 2006 and an animated series that ran for two decades on PBS Kids.
Throughout, Margret insisted that the character stay true to what she and Hans had made: a gentle, curious little monkey who learns by trying, failing and trying again. Her 1993 legal victory over the Canadian company that had licensed the films to third parties without permission protected that character for the children who would meet him later.
Licensing brought her considerable wealth late in life. She chose to give a great deal of it away.
Giving it back
In 1989 Margret Rey joined the board of Phillips Brooks House, Harvard's public service center, and around 1989 to 1991 (sources differ on the year) she set up the Curious George Foundation, which supported creative children and the prevention of cruelty to animals. She was a member of the World Wildlife Fund, the Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife, and a long-time supporter of the Longy School of Music.
In 1996, the last year of her life, she gave one million dollars to the Boston Public Library and one million dollars to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The Boston Public Library, one of the oldest and largest free public libraries in the United States, serves anyone who walks through its doors, and the hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital, treats patients of every background. Both gifts were made to institutions open to all, in the city that had welcomed the Reys and their monkey. She died of complications after a heart attack in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 21, 1996, at the age of 90. Her will left the couple's entire literary estate, drawings, manuscripts and correspondence, to the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, where it remains open to scholars.
Jewish background
Margret Rey was born into a German Jewish family in Hamburg; her mother's maiden name was Rosenfeld. History.com and Wikipedia describe her and her husband as German Jews, and it was as Jews that the couple fled first Nazi Germany and then occupied France. Their lives were saved by the visas signed under Aristides de Sousa Mendes, later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Legacy
Her final gift to scholarship was the archive. The connection began in 1966, when Lena de Grummond, a professor of library science at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote to the Reys about her new children's literature collection and they sent a pair of sketches. When Margret died, her will sent the entire literary estate there. More than 300 boxes of drawings, drafts, dummies and letters now let teachers, students and illustrators study how a classic picture book is made, from first sketch to finished page.
Margret Rey's legacy is a monkey who has taught millions of children that curiosity is a good thing, even when it leads to trouble, and a set of books that many people remember as the first they ever read by themselves. She also left a quieter legacy: gifts to a public library, a hospital and a children's literature archive, all of them open to everyone. The woman who once escaped across Europe on a homemade bicycle ended her life by making sure that what she had built would keep serving children and readers long after her.
Sources & further reading
Rey, Margret (1906–1996), Encyclopedia.com (Women in World History) · Curious George co-creator Margret Rey dies, History.com · Rey family, Sousa Mendes Foundation · Margret Rey, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.