Stan and Jan Berenstain started drawing together when they met in Miss Sweeny's drawing class on the first day of art school at Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now called The University of the Arts) in 1941.

They both lived in West Philadelphia but on different sides of the line that dictated school assignments, or they might have met much earlier. Both Stan and Jan enjoyed school. They liked to read. They like sports, but, most of all, they loved to draw.

Drawing and art became an increasingly important part of their lives as they moved on to junior and senior high school. Stan's family remained in West Philadelphia, so Stan went to West Philadelphia High School. Jan's family moved to the suburbs where Jan attended Radnor High School.

When they met on the first day of art school, it was their drawings of classical plaster casts that attracted their interest in each other. A warm friendship developed from their first meeting.

They spent after-school time together at art museums and Philadelphia Orchestra concerts where they sat in the “peanut gallery” – where most young people sat. They also attended Hedgerow Theater whose repertory consisted of the plays of George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare.

Their even closer friendship was interrupted by World War II when Stan went into the Army. He was sent to engineering school at the University of Maine, served in the field artillery, and was chosen during a hospital stay to be medical artist at an Army plastic surgery center in Indiana.

While Stan was in the Army, Jan served on the civilian front doing engineering drawing for military contractors and as a riveter in an aircraft factory.

Stan and Jan married shortly after he returned from his more than three years service in the Army.

Stan had become interested in cartooning and sold some cartoons to the Saturday Review of Literature during his last weeks in the Army. Jan also enjoyed doing cartoons and, after they married, joined Stan in submitting cartoons to magazines. It took them about a year of weekly submissions before they broke into the “big time”. But they soon became major contributors to such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and shortly thereafter became cover artists for Collier's.

Their entry into the book business was prompted by a letter from an editor at a New York publishing house who enjoyed their magazine cartoons. He asked if they would like to do a book.

Having just become parents of a baby boy named Leo, they decided to do a book about raising a baby. It was illustrated with their cartoons. It was called Berenstains'Baby Book. It proved successful and led to a number of books of family humor.

Raising two sons – Michael had joined Leo – who liked books, especially books by Dr. Seuss, Stan and Jan submitted a children's book to Dr. Seuss who had become the editor of Beginner Books, a Division of Random House.

They introduced the Bear family of Mama, Papa and Small Bear “who live down a sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country” in their first children's book, The Big Honey Hunt, published in 1962. They did a number of easy-to-read books under Dr. Seuss's editorship. They started their own line of books about everyday family experiences with the birth of Sister Bear (Small Bear became Brother Bear) in 1974. The Berenstain Bears New Baby proved successful and led to a series of such books which are still being created. They have dealt with dozens of subjects in their family series. Just when the Berenstains think they've run out of subjects about the challenges of everyday family life, they think of five or six more.

The Berenstains continue to do easy-to-read books as well because they believe that encouraging children to read is one of the most important things you can do for them.

Having created more than 300 Berenstain Bear books since 1962, over 200 are currently in print with the publishers Random House, HarperCollins and Zonderkidz. About 260 million copies in the series have been sold.

Younger son, Mike, who had become a successful writer/illustrator of children's books on his own, joined with his parents as part of the creative team in the late 1980s.

There have been three Berenstain Bears TV shows including a PBS series still shown throughout the US and in many other countries. Both the PBS series and many of the earlier shows are available on DVD.

Stan and Jan were always interested in theater, especially the musical theater. Their Children's musicals, The Berenstain Bears on Stage, The Berenstain Bears Save Christmas and The Berenstain Bears'Family Matters, have been produced at theaters throughout the country.

The Berenstain Bears are also featured in many children's museum exhibits including a permanent one at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Stan passed away in November, 2005 at the age of 82. Jan & Mike continue to write and illustrate Berenstain Bears books in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a beautiful region that looks for all the world like Berenstain Bear Country.
 

*Please note that Stan and Jan Berenstain have written an autobiography titled Down a Sunny Dirt Road.