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STAN BERENSTAIN FOUNDATION Stan Berenstain loved to draw as a child and spontaneously covered the walls of a room in his grandmother’s apartment. “No Sistine Chapel, no post office, no Altamira Cave ever cried out more loudly for decoration,” said Stan, although his grandmother felt otherwise. After attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art on a four-year merit scholarship (and where he met Jan on his first day of classes), Stan was drafted during World War II. He served as a medical illustrator where he observed and diagrammed procedures for the benefit of other doctors in the days before video or film was widely available. His first published works were cartoons featuring a hapless recruit for the Army newspaper. Before he was discharged he sold his first cartoons to the Saturday Review of Literature and his career was born.
After World War II magazines and newspapers prospered and ushered in the last period of the Golden Age of Illustration in America. In the era before television, periodicals provided national leisure time activity. Stan and Jan worked together as gag cartoonists, building on the success that Stan had achieved at the end of the war. Although their early days were the hardest, their unique status as a husband and wife team helped them become two of the most successful cartoonists of the period.  In 1962, Stan and Jan Berenstain published their first book about a family of bears who live down a sunny dirt road in Bear Country. Since then, the Berenstain Bears have become an American institution, making Stan and Jan the most popular author/illustrators in publishing with over 250 million books old. The Berenstain Bears was the first series of children’s books in publishing history to follow the antics of a particular family. Bear stories have been inspired by their own childhood memories and their experiences as the parents of two sons, which they considered the best possible source material.
Stan’s prodigious talents as an artist, cartoonist, illustrator and author, were a product of rich arts education and love of books throughout his life. With his passing, Jan and the rest of the Berenstain family, established the Stan Berenstain Foundation to encourage children’s literacy and arts education around the world. Through a variety of programs, the Stan Berenstain Foundation promotes literature and arts for children through direct interaction with books and arts material. A portion of proceeds from all Berenstain limited edition prints go directly to the Stan Berenstain Foundation. Other donations may be made by clicking here. |
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