Down a Sunny Dirt Road: An Autobiography

Once upon a time, in Mrs. Sweeney’s first year drawing class at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, a “lantern-jawed exotic” named Stan admired the drawing of a brown-haired, blue-eyed girl named Janice . . . and it was kismet! It also heralded the birth of one of the great collaborations in all of children’s literature: Stan and Jan Berenstain, creators of the Berenstain Bears. This enormously readable account tells of the early years before they met, their courtship (briefly interrupted by World War II), married life, and their first fateful meeting with Theodor Seuss Geisel–the editor-in-chief and president of Beginner Books. It was this fateful meeting that led to the publication of The Big Honey Hunt –the book that launched their careers as children’s book artists and introduced to the world what would quickly become America’s first family of bears: the Berenstain Bears.