Rey, Margret (16 May 1906-21 Dec. 1996), writer, was born Margret Elisabeth Waldstein in Hamburg, Germany, the daughter of Felix and Gertrude Rosenfeld Waldstein. Little is known of her childhood, though she is assumed to have grown up in comfortable middle-class circumstances in a secular Jewish household. In her late teens she studied painting and photography at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, and she subsequently attended the celebrated Bauhaus, a center for avant-garde art and design in Dessau. After moving to Berlin in the late 1920s, she worked as a photographer while painting on the side. She attracted some modest attention at the time with several exhibitions of her watercolors. With the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism, she moved to London and then to Brazil in the early 1930s. Settling in Rio de Janeiro, she continued working as a photographer as well as a reporter and advertising copywriter.

In 1935 Waldstein became reacquainted with H. A. Rey, another German Jewish émigré from Hamburg. Rey had courted Waldstein's elder sister some years earlier and was now working for his family's import-export business. Rey, who had artistic talent but no formal instruction, had dabbled in commercial illustration, and at Waldstein's suggestion, the pair opened an advertising agency in Rio, ostensibly the first such agency in Brazil. They were married soon afterward, and in early 1936 they went to Paris on their honeymoon. Enamored of the city and its historically hospitable climate for artists, the couple decided to remain there. Margret Rey began to earn a living as a copywriter, while her husband became a freelance illustrator and cartoonist.

In their off-hours, Rey and her husband collaborated on children's picture storybooks, then a relatively new medium, and through contacts in London they published their first joint work in that genre, How the Flying Fishes Came into Being, in 1938. Soon afterward, some of H. A. Rey's commercial illustrations (drawings of giraffes for a Paris periodical) caught the eye of an editor at the French publishing company Gallimard, and he invited Rey to do a children's picture book. Rey, in turn, asked his wife to provide the text. The result was Rafi et les Neufs Singes, which appeared in England as Raffy and the Nine Monkeys. Both editions were issued in 1939, and that same year their children's verse collection Anybody at Home?--with poems by Margret Rey and illustrations by her husband--was also published in England. Raffy and the Nine Monkeys tells the story of the comic antics that ensue when a lonely giraffe invites a family of monkeys to share her home. Aimed at children aged three to six, the book garnered glowing reviews and enjoyed respectable sales, and the couple began to focus in earnest on a new career.

For their next project, the Reys chose as their subject a character in Raffy and the Nine Monkeys: an inquisitive simian named George. Meanwhile, World War II had begun in Europe, and by the spring of 1940 France was in danger of being overtaken by the Nazis. Early on the morning of 13 June, hours before German troops marched into Paris, the Reys fled the city on bicycles, heading south toward the French-Spanish border. According to their accounts, they took nothing but the clothing on their backs and their manuscripts, including their story of George the monkey. The couple eventually made their way to Lisbon, and from there they sailed back to Rio de Janeiro. They remained in Rio for several months, settling their affairs and making arrangements to emigrate to the United States. The Reys finally arrived in New York City in October 1940. After moving into an apartment in Greenwich Village, then a Mecca for artists and writers, they began looking for a publisher. Their search ended quickly; within a week they had sold their picture book to Houghton Mifflin, an old and distinguished Boston firm.

Titled Curious George, the book was published in 1941. This story of a nosy little monkey who lives with a patient and kindly friend, "the man in the yellow hat," became an instant hit with children and their parents. Critics were also charmed by the mute, unclothed, and banana-loving George (he was a monkey, after all), whose mischievous antics bore an unmistakable resemblance to those of five-year-old male humans. The success of their character prompted Margret Rey and her husband, at the instigation of Houghton Mifflin, to create six more Curious George books: Curious George Takes a Job (1947), Curious George Rides a Bike (1952), Curious George Gets a Medal (1957), Curious George Flies a Kite (1958), Curious George Learns the Alphabet (1963), and Curious George Goes to the Hospital (1966). Margret Rey not only wrote the stories that her husband illustrated; she also reportedly "posed" as George for her husband, leaping around the studio and contorting her face in simian mimicry.

Neither the words nor the illustrations of the Curious George series are, taken singly, remarkable. H. A. Rey's pictures, in bright primary colors, resemble comic book art, and Margret Rey's prose is simple and predictable. But together they create an appealing experience for small children: the text, written in a calm, gentle tone that is never patronizing, provides a soothingly static counterpoint to the animated quality of the artwork. Each book opens in the same way, informing the reader that the protagonist "was a good little monkey, but he was always curious." George's curiosity invariably leads him to wander out into the world of grown-up humans, where he becomes involved in often risky, though never truly scary, predicaments. The humans he encounters react to him with puzzlement and sometimes alarm, but they never explode in anger, and "the man in the yellow hat" always arrives just in time to extricate George from his current fix, deliver a gentle rebuke, and bring him home. The comforting subliminal message to small children is clear: the man in the yellow hat--a stand-in for Mom or Dad--will always be there to rescue them.

In addition to the Curious George series, Houghton Mifflin published other children's picture books by the Reys, beginning in 1941 with How Do You Get There?. This was followed by Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys (1942), a retitled edition of Raffy and the Nine Monkeys; Elizabite: The Adventures of a Carnivorous Plant (1942); and a series of illustrated verse books, with poems by Margret Rey: Tit for Tat (1942); Where's My Baby? (1943); a republication of Anybody at Home? (1943); Feed the Animals (1944); and See the Circus (1956). Margret Rey also collaborated with her husband on Mary Had a Little Lamb (1951), providing a revised text of the traditional nursery rhyme. All of these collaborations were well received, although none enjoyed the popularity of the Curious George series, which had quickly been established as children's classics. The Reys' picture book Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World was published posthumously in 2000. During the 1940s Margret Rey also authored four children's books published by Harper & Row: Pretzel (1944), Spotty (1945), Pretzel and the Puppies (1946), and Billy's Picture (1948). These are not considered collaborations, although her husband is identified on the title page as the illustrator.

In 1963 the Reys, who were childless, moved from New York City to Cambridge, Massachusetts. H. A. Rey died in 1977, and the following year Margret began teaching creative writing at Brandeis University, where she remained on the faculty until her own death. During the final decades of her life, Rey was also actively involved in the merchandising of the Curious George series, overseeing the production of related dolls, toys, and games. In addition to the seven original books, twenty-eight more were published between 1984 and 1990. These editions were based on a series of children's films that continued the adventures of the famous monkey. Rey, together with Allan J. Shalleck, acted as the text editor for these sequels, which were intended to prepare children for everyday experiences; they ranged from Curious George Goes to the Circus (1984) to Curious George Goes to a Toy Store (1990). The Reys' primate creation made them very wealthy, and on her ninetieth birthday, in May 1996, Margret Rey donated $1 million to the Boston Public Library Foundation and $1 million to Boston's Beth Israel Hospital Center for Alternative Medicine. She died seven months later in a Cambridge hospital.

For biographical information, see especially "Rey, Margret (Elisabeth)," in Something About the Author, vol. 86 (1996), which is based on interviews with Rey; see also Miriam Hoffman and Eva Samuels, eds., Authors and Illustrators of Children's Books: Writings on Their Lives and Works (1972). In addition, see Lee Bennett Hopkins, Books Are by People (1969). Further discussions and evaluations of the work of Rey and her husband are in Barbara Bader, American Picture Books from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within (1976), and Lillian H. Smith, The Unreluctant Years: A Critical Approach to Children's Literature (1953). Louise Borden's The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey (2005) is an illustrated biography intended for children, but it appeals to anyone interested in the Reys. An obituary is in the New York Times, 23 Dec. 1996.