Dick and Jane

Uncommon card · No. 180501

Dick and Jane are the two protagonists created by Zerna Sharp for a series of basal readers (primers) written by William S. Gray to teach children to read. The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965. On January 1, 2026, the first book entered the public domain in the US. These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in some other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them. Although the Dick and Jane series of primers continued to be sold until 1973 and remained in use in some classrooms throughout the 1970s, they were replaced with other reading texts by the 1980s and gradually disappeared from school curricula. The Dick and Jane series is known for its simple narrative text and watercolor illustrations. For a generation of middle-class Americans...

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