Stan Berenstain, who with his wife, Jan, wrote and illustrated the best-selling Berenstain Bears children's books -- soft-sell morality plays that revel in poking fun at and safely solving the everyday travails of family life -- has died. He was 82.
Berenstain died of complications from cancer Saturday in Bucks County, Pa., said his publisher, HarperCollins Children's Books.
The more than 200 books published since 1962 have a Seinfeldian quality, because entire volumes are built around ordinary matters -- messy rooms, a visit to the dentist, fear of the dark -- that constitute high drama for the under-7 set.
"They were able to take the real issues of children's lives and make them entertaining and not preachy," said Ilene Abramson, director of children's services at the Los Angeles Public Library. "The books had messages of basic character-building, but they were always done with humor and with that strong sense of family."
The family of bears in human clothing were simply named Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister and, much later, Baby to capitalize on the "Everybear" concept of the stories, Berenstain once said.
The idea for the series was born in 1960 after Berenstain read a New Yorker magazine profile on a Random House editor, Theodor Geisel, who was launching a line of books for young readers.
The Berenstains sought out the man better known as Dr. Seuss, taking with them what they called "a bad imitation of Ogden Nash."
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.
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."
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. The moves were credited with making the books easy to market, and nearly 300 million copies have been sold.
"Stan Berenstain was a man of great humor and a generous spirit. 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. "It's the end of an era."
