Children's author and illustrator who created the famous bear family with her husband, Stan
The children's author and illustrator Jan Berenstain, who created the Berenstain Bears books with her husband, Stan, has died aged 88. The pair worked on more than 200 of the books about a family of pleasingly homely and disarmingly simple bears, which have been breakthrough titles for generations of emerging readers. The style was set in their first title, The Big Honey Hunt (1962): simple storytelling with a strong narrative core and a certain amount of familiarity and predictability, written in easy verse making good use of repetition, rhyme and rhythm. The stories were matched with vigorous cartoonish illustrations. With a nod of knowing sophistication between the storyteller and the reader, the books were witty and stylish rather than babyish.
The Berenstains had already created many cartoon stories for adult readers, including It's All in the Family, which ran in McCall's and Good Housekeeping magazines. Watching their son's enjoyment of the Dr Seuss books, they decided to try their hand at a children's title. They chose a family of bears partly because they found them easy to draw and partly, Stan said, because female bears are "terrifyingly good mothers" while the males are "lousy fathers".
Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Geisel, was the editor of the highly successful Beginner Books series published by Random House in the US. The Berenstains took their book to him, and he encouraged them to modernise their folksy art style, make it look more commercial and rework the text extensively.
He published The Big Honey Hunt, but when the Berenstains proposed a whole series about a bear family, Geisel said: "That's the worst thing you could do! It would be like having a millstone around your neck. Do something as different as you can!" They took the advice and worked on a book about penguins. But before they had submitted it, The Big Honey Hunt had sold well and Geisel was now enthusiastic about a series.
The second book, The Bike Lesson (1964), included the cover line "Another Adventure of the Berenstain Bears", added by Geisel himself. The Berenstains developed, adapted and modernised the series throughout their lives. At a later date, and without consultation, Geisel effected their name change, reducing them from Stanley and Janice to Stan and Jan, which he subsequently justified on the grounds that they fitted on one line. The books have a deep sense of goodness at their core. Initially, the stories were situation-based with a built-in moral, as in The Bears' Picnic (1966); later, they became more obviously moralising and message-driven with titles such as The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food (1985) and The Berenstain Bears Show God's Love (2010).
Janice Marian Grant was born in Philadelphia. Bucks County, where she later lived and worked, inspired much of the background scenery of the Bears books. She attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), where she met Stan. During the second world war, she worked as a draughtswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers and as an aircraft riveter. She and Stan married in 1946 and began creating work together. In the 1980s, their son Michael joined them, working first on the cartoons for adults and, from 1992, illustrating and co-writing the Bear books. After Stan's death in 2005, Jan and Michael would work out a story concept and then, together or separately, do the illustrations. Summing up her books a couple of years ago, Jan said: "They say jokes don't travel well, but family humour does. Family values is what we're all about." She had two titles in production and was still illustrating until the day before her death.
She is survived by her sons, Leo and Michael, and four grandchildren.
• Janice Marian Berenstain, author and illustrator, born 26 July 1923; died 24 February 2012