MARY POPE OSBOURNE

Children's Author

Mary  Pope Osbourne grew up in the military. By the time she was fifteen she had lived in Oklahoma, Austria, Florida, and four different army posts in Virginia and North Carolina. She had a very close and loving relationship with her parents and siblings ; a twin brother and two sisters. When her father  finally retired to a small town in North Carolina, she "nearly went crazy with boredom. I craved the adventure and changing scenery of our military life".

One day Mary found a local community theater and spent nearly every waking hour after school there, either acting or working backstage. She went on to study drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her junior year, she  discovered the world of mythology and comparative religion. Mary became a religion major and learned as much as she could about other cultures.

"After graduating from college in the early 1970s, I lived an intensely varied life. For a while I camped in a cave on the island of Crete. Then I joined up with a small band of European young people heading to "The East." We traveled overland in a caravan of rickety vans through sixteen Asian countries, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal."

Mary's trip which included a brush with death during an earthquake in northern Afghanistan and a riot in Kabul, was brought to a halt when she got blood poisoning and had to return home. Once she fully recovered from her illness she worked as a window dresser in Carmel, California, as a medical assistant in Monterey, California, and as a Russian travel consultant in Washington, D.C.  While in Washington, Mary attended the opening of a musical about Jesse James.  From the balcony she fell in love with Will Osborne, the actor/musician playing Jesse. "I loved his boots and his white cowboy hat; I loved how he sang and strummed the guitar. A year later, in New York City, we were married."

With Will on the road, Mary worked various jobs and one day began writing a story about an eleven-year-old girl in the South who shared many incidents in the story  which were similar to happenings in her own childhood. That story  became a young adult novel called Run, Run as Fast as You Can and marked the beginning of her seventeen year, forty book (so far) career.
 

Mary is best known for The Magic Tree House series where she transports her young readers to the times of dinosaurs, knights, mummies, pirates, and ninjas, and traveling to the rain forest, the Ice Age, the moon, a coral reef, the Wild West, Africa, and the Arctic.  In February 1993, Ms. Osborne was elected the twenty-seventh president of the Author's Guild, the oldest and most established organization for writers in the United States. She and her husband Will live in New York City.

SOURCE:

http://www.randomhouse.com/kids/magictreehouse/html/mth_3.html