Jan Berenstain was co-creator with her husband Stan of more than 300 picture books featuring the Berenstain Bears. With about 260 million copies sold and translated into 23 languages, these stories about an anthropomorphic bear family greatly entertained generations of children. Their parents, often pressed into repeated re-readings, occasionally tired of the relentlessly improving tone and atmosphere of sweet innocence. But children loved the general message that life’s little problems, from a first visit to the dentist to coping with a bad dream, can always be overcome with a little determination and comforting common sense. They also appreciated the simple cartoon-like artwork and limited vocabulary, perfect for infants learning to read themselves.
Janice Marian Grant was born in Philadelphia in 1923. Her father was a successful carpenter and builder but the family fell on hard times during the Depression. Brought up in the Episcopalian faith, which she retained all her life, she was a precocious artist from an early age. In 1941 she enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art along with her future husband Stanley, also aged 18. Immediately becoming a couple, they drew their first bears while visiting the local zoo. In 1942 Stanley went off to fight while Janice was employed as a draughtsman for the Army Corps of Engineers and then as a riveter building navy sea-planes. When the couple married in 1946, their ring was made from the aluminum with which she had previously been working.
Moving into a house with room for a joint drawing board, Stanley and Janice first succeeded with their full-page cartoon series It’s All in the Family, which ran for 35 years, first in McCall’s and then in Good Housekeeping. Each took turns at writing or illustrating, with Stanley concentrating on humour and Janice more interested in conveying feeling. Attracted by the strip’s wholesome, folksy atmosphere, Theodore Geisel, more famously known by his pen-name Dr Seuss, approached the couple in his capacity as Editor in Chief of Beginner Books, a division of Random House publishers. Already influenced by his work through reading it to the two sons now born to them, the couple came up with a picture book entitled Freddy Bear’s Spanking, which, perhaps fortunately for them, never saw the light of day.
Recognising their talent, Geisel encouraged them still to stick with bears, which they found easy to draw and more human-like than penguins, their other idea for an animal family. They finally came up with The Big Honey Hunt (1962). Still in print, this story about a groundlessly over-optimistic father bear and his son going out on an abortive search for wild honey was an instant hit. Details such as the bears’ multi-storeyed treehouse and Mother Bear’s blue polka dot dress and dust-cap were to become stock in trade for all succeeding titles. Their names on the title page were now shortened by Geisel to Stan and Jan, so creating a catchy internal rhyme to go with the alliterative Berenstain Bears, the name for the bear family henceforth.
Their most successful title was The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room (1983). In it the bear parents, now rounder and more cuddly than in their first appearance, come up against Brother and Sister Bear’s inability to keep their room tidy. Papa Bear, a carpenter by trade, finally solves the problem by making some wooden boxes where everything can be efficiently stowed away. Other titles took on more contentious subjects, such as obesity, bad manners or bullying at school. The Berenstain Bears’ New Neighbors (1994) confronts the topic of racism, with Papa Bear, this time in his role as a junior version of Homer Simpson, behaving in a generally unfriendly way to an Asian-looking panda family that had moved in next door. All stories tended to follow a similar pattern, with Papa Bear initially flummoxed by the latest situation until Mama Bear effortlessly sorts things out by the end. Other books and series appeared too, but none with the same appeal as the now famous Berenstain Bears.
Advertisement
Stan died in 2005, three years after the couple had produced an affectionately written and beautifully illustrated joint autobiography, Down a Sunny Dirt Road (2002). Jan continued working, now with her illustrator-writer son Michael. By this time Berenstain Enterprises was a multimillion-dollar corporation, taking in television specials, software, clothes, toys and video games as well as books. As time went on, criticism grew of the rigid gender distinctions found in these stories. Others objected to so-called British affectations, with characters uttering phrases such as “Terribly sorry” or “Lovely, my dear”. Bear Country, where the family lived, was described by some as over-placid, with none of the dark underside that made Rupert Bear stories this side of the Atlantic so exciting. Further pejorative adjectives about the couple’s work have included “syrupy”, “unsatisfying”, “infuriatingly formulaic”, “hokey”, “abominable”, and “little more than stern lectures dressed up as children’s stories”.
But they had many defenders too. For Jerry Spinelli, a distinguished American author, “the Berenstains made a wonderful and lasting contribution to children’s literature”. Another author and academic, Professor Donna Jo Napoli, has written that “Those bears have helped so many children through so many kinds of challenges that kids face, in such a cheerful and kind of energetic way”.
While the stories never pretended to greatness in writing or illustration, there is little doubt that they were enjoyed by small children. Young readers may, too, have also learnt something useful about learning to cope either with themselves or else with aspects of the outside world. The willingness of the couple to accommodate anti-smoking and pro-vaccination messages in some of their later books is typical of their continuing concern for young people, whatever the risk of their being labelled unduly prissy or interfering.
Living for many years in the idyllic surrounds of Bucks County in South-East Pennsylvania, Jan in later life found inspiration for new stories from her four grandchildren, just as she had done previously with her own family. She died of a stroke in nearby Doylestown Hospital, having worked on her last book only two days previously.
She is survived by her two sons.
Advertisement
Jan Berenstain, children’s author and illustrator, was born on July 26, 1923. She died on February 24, 2012, aged 88