Margret Rey

Margret Elizabeth Rey (May 16, 1906 – December 21, 1996) was a 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.

Life

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.