Jan Berenstain: A Beary Good Artist
Jan Berenstain and her husband, Stan, have entertained children with their Berenstain Bears books for over the last sixty years (Stoneman13). The illustrated books talk about wholesome family morals with a funny, lighthearted approach and a family full of bears who lived in a tree house. The adventures the bears encountered in the books mirrored Jan and Stan’s own family life and everyday obstacles. While raising sons Leo and Micheal (Berenstain 125), the Berenstains spent countless days in their office thinking up of new ways for Papa Bear to mess up, Sister and Brother Bear to get caught in the middle of it, and Mama Bear to fix it all up. Jan’s deepest passion, her love of art, has built up a beautiful career with the partnership of Stan and has brought her from scribbling in her father’s illustrated books (Berenstain 11) to making her own beloved children’s books.
Jan’s love of art started early and followed her up through college where she met Stan. Her art obsession was probably inherited from her father, Alfred Grant, who was a carpenter by day and attended art school by night (Harris 22). Jan would get her inspiration for drawing from the Sunday cartoons because she felt like the finely-drawn comics would “challenge” her to draw them (Berenstain a. 28) After she graduated high school in 1941 (Harris 22), she attended the Philadelphia Collage of Art (McLeod 1) where she met her future lifelong partner. According to Jan, her and Stan’s first meeting was “love at first sight” (Harris 22). Within weeks after they met, Jan and Stan were starting to the movies together and on drawing dates to the zoo to draw their favorite animals which were bears (Harris 23). Their plans to get married, however, were interrupted by the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Berenstain b. 73). Stan was drafted by the army to become a medical artist (Berenstain a. 28-29), while Jan went to work at a factory that built wing parts for sea planes (McLeod 1).
After the war was over, Jan’s career as an artist kicked off when she married Stan in 1946 (McLeod 2). The worked together on many cartoons to send out to multiple newspapers and magazines a week, but none were ever accepted (McLeod 2). After having about a year’s worth of rejections, the couple went to go confront the editor of the Saturday Evening Post (McLeod 2), John Bailey (Berenstain b. 119), for advice on why none of their cartoons were selling (McLeod 2). Bailey suggested the Berenstains did a cartoon focused on something different, like family life (McLeod 2). Following his encouragement, the Berenstains created their first successful cartoon called “Its All in the Family” (Harris 23). The cartoon was featured in magazines such as McCall’s and Good Housekeeping (Harris 23), and in 1951, the Berenstains published their first book for adults titled The Berenstain Baby Book (Harris 24).
Interested in the children’s books their sons were reading, Jan and her husband were inspired to do a children’s book of their own (Berenstain a. 29). They wanted to grab children’s attention with a humorous approach they way Dr. Seuss had done with his new books at the time and felt that they could write stories based on their own family humor to little kids (Berenstain a. 29). Soon enough they got a contract with Beginners Books (Berenstain b. 141) and joined together with Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss himself, to work on their first book (McLeod 3). The Berenstains had an idea of a book with a talking bear family as characters who lived in a tree house, while Geisel pushed them very hard on what the bears where really about (Harris 24). According to Stan, he would ask them questions such as “Who are these bears?...Why do they live in a tree? What does Papa do for a living? What kind of pipe tobacco does he smoke?...What sort of family is it?....” (Berenstain b. 145-146). Finally in 1962 (Berenstain a. 29), the Berenstains published their first children’s book titled The Big Honey Hunt (Harris 24). The hard work they put into making the book showed, because it was so popular it was practically disappearing off the shelves. Geisel was immensely impressed and called the Berenstains demanding “More bear books!” (Harris 24)
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