Jan, Stan, and Mike Berenstain

Stanley Melvin Berenstain and Janice Marian Grant were both born in 1923 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, growing up in families struggling through the Great Depression. They met in 1941 while attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts. Stan was drafted into the Army during World War II and served from 1943 to 1946. Blind in one eye, he was given limited service, and spent most of his army career as a medical illustrator at an army hospital in Indiana. During the war, Jan worked as a draftsman for the Army Corps of Engineers and as an aircraft riveter building the US Navy's PBY flying boat. During his service, Stan began drawing cartoons and publishing them in magazines.

Stan and Jan were married right after the war and began careers as a magazine cartoonist team. They published cartoons focusing on humor about children and families in The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers Magazine, McCall's, Good Housekeeping and many more. Many of these cartoons were also published as book collections.

The start of their own family came with the birth of son, Leo, in 1948, followed by Mike in 1951. Since both sons were big Dr. Seuss fans, Stan and Jan decided to try their hands at creating a children's book themselves. Their efforts became The Big Honey Hunt, which featured Papa, Mama and, at that time, Small Bear. It was released in 1962 with Dr. Seuss (aka Ted Seuss Geisel) himself as the editor and publisher.

More than two hundred Berenstain Bears books have followed in the fifty-three years since, and total sales of the series have topped 250 million copies. A few changes have come along the way: Small Bear became Brother Bear with the birth of Sister in 1974, and the littlest sister, Honey, arrived in 2000. The names, "Papa," "Mama," "Brother," and "Sister" were chosen for ease of reading and to emphasize their archetypal roles in the family.

Until the late ‘80s, Stan and Jan continued their work as magazine cartoonists along with their children's book creations. Their son, Mike, became a children's book author-illustrator in the 1970s and, in the 1980s, joined his parents in their magazine work. By 1992, he had moved on to illustrating and co-writing Berenstain Bears books. Soon the popularity of the Berenstain Bears spread beyond the world of children’s books. The first animated adaptation, an NBC Christmas special called The Berenstain Bears’ Christmas Tree, was produced in 1979. Four other NBC seasonal specials followed in the early ‘80s. From 1985-1986, two seasons of a Saturday morning Berenstain Bears cartoon aired on CBS, and in 2002, PBS created a season of daily Berenstain Bears cartoons.

Shortly after publication of the series moved from Random House to HarperCollins in 2004, Mike suggested to Stan and Jan that they create a new sub-line of Berenstain Bears books that reflect spiritual themes while continuing to publish their traditional storybooks. They co-created the first four titles in the ongoing Living Lights series released by the HarperCollins publishing group, Zondervan, in 2008.

After a long illness, Stan passed away in November 2005 at the age of eighty-two. Jan died in February 2012, at the age of eighty-eight. Mike continues to write and illustrate Berenstain Bears books on all sorts of subjects – everything from going for a ride on the train to the golden rule. He lives and works in the rolling countryside of Eastern Pennsylvania – a place that looks very much like Berenstain Bear Country.

Related Exhibitions: The Berenstain Bears Out West (2006); The Berenstain Bears Celebrate: The Art of Jan and Stan Berenstain (2004), curated by the Norman Rockwell Museum