Margret Elizabeth Rey Essay, Research Paper

Margret Elizabeth Rey was born May 16, 1906 in Hamburg, Germany. Her father, Felix Waldstein, was a well-known member of the German parliament and Margret was use to a lot of activities in the large house that was home to five children, four servants, and a dog, as well as her father’s political colleagues, who were frequent visitors.

Margret Rey received formal art training at the Bauhaus in 1927. She studied at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art from 1928 to 1929 at which time she held one-woman art shows of her watercolors in Berlin in the early thirties.

After working as a professional photographer in Berlin and London, Margret went to Rio de Janiero in 1935. There she became reacquainted with H. A. Rey, whom she had first known in Hamburg when he was dating her older sister. The two worked together to create a very small advertising agency. They were married in Rio de Janiero in 1935, and took their honeymoon in Europe in 1936. Hans sold bathtubs up and down the Amazon River to make extra money for the couple to live on while trying to get their work published in Europe. They then stayed in Paris for four years. In 1939, their lives in Paris were cut short by the Nazi invasion. It was at this time that they had already begun their work on the manuscript of Curious George. They had to pack what they could and flee Paris. Taking the Curious George manuscript with them, the Reys fled on bicycles and eventually completed the book in the south of France. They arrived in New York in October of 1940, and Houghton Mifflin published Curious George in 1941. They eventually ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There followed six more books about George and a series of multimedia CD-ROMs.

Margret Rey also published 5 other books including “Spotty” and “Pretzel”. They were also the creators of many of the lift-the-flap books. Margret Rey along with her husband, H. A. (Hans Augusto) Rey created one of the world’s most enduring, beloved, and best-selling children’s