Margret Rey

Margret Rey
Margret Rey with her husband, H.A. Rey
Born	Margarete Elisabethe Waldstein (1906-05-16)May 16, 1906 Hamburg, Germany
Died	December 21, 1996(1996-12-21) (aged 90) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Writer, illustrator
Education	Bauhaus
Genre	Children's literature
Notable works	Curious George
Years active	1939–1966
Spouse	H.A. Rey (1935–1977; his death)

Margret Elizabeth Rey (May 16, 1906 – December 21, 1996) was a German-born American writer and illustrator, known best for the Curious George series of children's picture books that she and her husband H. A. Rey created from 1939 to 1966.

Margarete Elisabethe Waldstein was born in Hamburg in 1906. Her father was a member of the Reichstag. She studied art at Bauhaus in Dessau,Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and the University of Munich, and afterward worked in advertising. In 1935 she left Germany for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to escape Nazism – and to meet Hans Reyersbach, a salesman and another German Jew from Hamburg, who had been a family friend. They married in 1935 and moved to Paris, France, in 1936.

While in Paris, Hans's animal drawings came to the attention of French publisher, who commissioned him to write a children's book. The result, Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys, is little remembered today, but one of its characters, an adorably impish monkey named Curious George, was such a success that the couple considered writing a book just about him. Their work was interrupted with the outbreak of World War II. As Jews, the Reys decided to flee Paris before the Nazis seized the city. Hans built two bicycles, and they fled Paris just a few hours before it fell. Among the meager possessions they brought with them was the illustrated manuscript of Curious George.

The Reys' odyssey brought them to the Spanish border, where they bought train tickets to Lisbon. From there they returned to Brazil, where they had met five years earlier, but this time they continued to New York City. The books were published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941, though certain changes had to be introduced because of the technology of the time. Hans and Margret originally planned to use watercolors to illustrate the books, but since they were responsible for the color separation, he changed these to the cartoon-like images that continue to feature in each of the books. (A collector's edition with the original watercolors was released in 1998.)