There are plenty of widely known books, book series, and characters written for children. Howard Garis may have written more of them than anybody.
Garis was born in New York state on April 25, 1873. As an adult he moved to Newark, New Jersey and worked for a while as a reporter for the Newark Evening News. When radio arrived, he worked for a Newark radio station as well. He began writing stories for children as newspaper articles — starting in 1910, he wrote a story about his character Uncle Wiggily every day except Sunday. And he kept at it for the next forty years. Uncle Wiggily, by the way, is an elderly rabbit. He walks with a crutch because of rheumatism, and regularly encounters characters like the Pipsisewah and Skeezicks (they’re bad guys; Uncle Wiggily always defeats their schemes), not to mention the Bazumpus, the Crozokus, and of course the infamous Scuttlemagoon. Uncle Wiggily is often referred to as the “old rabbit gentleman,” and in addition to defeating bad chaps, he helps the animal children in the area whenever they run into difficulties.
Uncle Wiggily was widely popular in the US in the first half of the 20th Century. The stories were nationally syndicated and ran in countless newspapers, and they were compiled and republished in books. In 1916 the Uncle Wiggily board game appeared, and is still available. But Garis didn’t stop there. He met Edward Stratemeyer when the Stratemeyer Syndicate was just starting up. the Syndicate was a publishing house that specialized in book series for young people. Each series, like the Tom Swift adventures and the Bobbsey Twins stories, was written by a single author — but each author was just a pseudonym. In real life, a huge number of the books were written by Garis. He wrote about thirty Bobbsey Twins books as “Laura Lee Hope,” quite a few Tom Swift books as “Victor Appleton,” and the all the books in the the Motor Boys and Baseball Joe series.
There are more. A lot more, from the Circus Animal series to the Three Little Trippertrots, which were a bit different — an early subscription entertainment service, the New Jersey Telephone Herald, included the Trippertrots stories read aloud. Over the telephone. Subscribers could call the service on their home phones and listen to newspaper stories, children’s fiction, and music, all in the remarkable fidelity provided by telephone handsets in 1912.
Garis was married, and his wife Lilian (who he met when they were both newspaper reporters at the Newark Evening News) also wrote children’s books and book series for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Her pen names were Margaret Penrose and Laura Lee Hope. Between about 1910 and about 1950, the couple wrote literally hundreds of books. Those book series are admittedly formulaic and not really examples of great literature — but the sheer volume of work produced by the Garis family is amazing. And without AI, too.
One of their children, Roger Garis, was a lawyer, but also became a writer and wrote for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He also wrote a biography of the family, My Father was Uncle Wiggily. And Roger’s daughter Leslie Garis is Yet Another Writer, and published the memoir The House of Happy Endings in 2007. If you find yourself somehow caught in an Uncle Wiggly story or involved with the Bobbsey Twins, take heart — as the most recent memoir suggests, every story Howard Garis ever wrote has a happy ending.
