But business picked up after they listened to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, who told them to stop quoting Shakespeare and start riffing on the absurdity of family life - burnt dinners, empty toothpaste tubes, bleary-eyed parents.
They didn’t sell a single cartoon for a year. Their first piece of furniture was a drawing table.
Thirteen days after Berenstain was discharged in 1946, the couple married and promptly embarked on a joint career. While still an Army corporal, he sold his first cartoon for $35 to the Saturday Review of Literature. They were separated by World War II when Jan went to work as a riveter and Stan served three years in the Army, including doing medical illustrations for a plastic surgeon. Their dating ritual included weekly class visits to the zoo, where they often sketched bears because “no one else wanted to and we could be alone,” Berenstain told the Tampa Tribune in 1999. In 1941, on his first day at what is now the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, Berenstain met his future wife when they admired each other’s drawings of classical plaster casts. When he was growing up, he and his parents, Harry and Rose, lived above an Army-Navy surplus store. 29, 1923, into what he described as a gritty, lower-class Philadelphia family that had been “pogrommed out of the Ukraine.” He helped define children’s publishing as we know it today,” Kate Jackson, editor in chief of HarperCollins Children’s Books, said in a statement. “Stan Berenstain was a man of great humor and a generous spirit. The moves were credited with making the books easy to market, and nearly 300 million copies have been sold. Without consulting them, Geisel shortened the authors’ names from Stanley and Janice to Stan and Jan to make them rhyme and slapped the phrase “Berenstain Bears” on succeeding covers.
When Geisel, a fan of cinematic plotting, asked the couple to characterize the bears as familiar actors, they compared Papa Bear to Wallace Beery and Brother Bear to Jackie Cooper in the weepy 1931 boxing film “The Champ.” Geisel looked at the slim manuscript that would become “The Big Honey Hunt” two years later and said, “This is going to be a great book,” Berenstain told The Times in 1995. Seuss, taking with them what they called “a bad imitation of Ogden Nash.” The Berenstains sought out the man better known as Dr.
0 kommentar(er)
