The idea for Stanley came to him one night at bedtime when his sons J. Preferring to write himself, he sold fiction and articles to national magazines while working at The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and finally at Warner Books, where he was a senior editor until 1980. In Hollywood he worked for the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. A graduate of the Professional Children's School, he provided a child's voice in a radio drama and appeared onstage. Originally a child actor, he became Jeff Brown because Actors Equity already had a Richard Brown as a member. Jeff Brown was born Richard Chester Brown. In translation, he traveled to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Israel, among other places.

The character's life extended further, as schoolchildren mailed cut-outs of him to their friends. (All together, Stanley's tales have sold nearly a million copies in the United States, HarperCollins said Thursday.) The latest, ''Stanley, Flat Again!,'' was published this year by HarperCollins Children's Books. Brown had worked in Hollywood and as an editor and writer in New York before creating Flat Stanley, a hero for the youngest readers whose adventures, with illustrations by Tomi Ungerer, were first published in 1964.įlat Stanley became the star of a series of perpetually popular books. The cause was a heart attack he suffered while walking near his home, his family said.Ī native New Yorker, Mr. He was 77 and lived on the Upper East Side. Jeff Brown, a magazine editor and short-story writer who created Flat Stanley, the two-dimensional hero of an enduring series of children's books, died on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown