STAN BERENSTAIN, co-author of the Berenstain Bears children’s books, was one half of a remarkable husband-and-wife team who began their artistic collaboration from the day they celebrated their wedding with the purchase of a drawing table.

Created with the guidance of Theodor Geisel, who as “Dr Seuss” revolutionised the world of early reading, Stan and Jan Berenstain’s cosy picture books are a firm fixture in millions of American homes. Since the first, The Great Honey Hunt, was published in 1962, more than 250 “Bears” books have sold nearly 300 million copies.

The Berenstain Bears embody a perfect suburban existence where nothing too distressing ever happens; where all problems and fears can be overcome with love and humour by bedtime.

Mama Bear is a domestic rock, and Papa Bear, a spiritual precursor of Homer Simpson, shares with a long line of American cartoon fathers an ineptitude “that makes Dagwood Bumstead Blondie in 1933 look like Batman,” according to The Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer.

With the help of the bear family living “down a sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country”, generations of American youngsters have coped with life’s little hurdles — untidiness, bad manners, fear of the dark, the “galloping greedy gimmes”, and school bullies. In particular the First Time series helps children to face challenges — the new babysitter, the new school, moving house, going to camp.

In the 1980s, darker themes such as “stranger danger” and drugs crept into Bear Country, but basically little has changed there in 40 years. Berenstain said in 2002: “Nobody gets shot. No violence. There are problems, but they’re the kind of typical family problems everyone goes through.”

Born into a “gritty, lower-class” Philadelphia family “pogrommed out of Ukraine”, Stanley met Janice Grant in 1941 on their first day at the city’s Museum School of Industrial Art. On class outings to Philadelphia Zoo, the pair went off to draw the bears because “nobody else wanted to and we could be alone”.

In the war Stanley, who was nearly blind in one eye, joined the army as a medical artist. Thirteen days after being discharged in 1946 Stanley married Janice, and they immediately began working as a team.

However, they failed to sell any cartoons for a year — until the local newspaper editor advised them to “stop quoting Shakespeare” and concentrate on the absurdities of family life. Years of successful cartoons and illustrations for consumer magazines as well as humorous cartoon books and what Stanley called “cartoon essays” followed.

In 1960, on hearing that Geisel, head of children’s publishing at Random House, had launched a series of books that taught children to read while entertaining them, the Berenstains sent him their proposal for The Great Honey Hunt.

Based on their children’s bedtime tales, the story told of a papa bear who tried to impress his son with superior wisdom, but always ended up in comical disaster. Written in rhyme, it was aimed at children just beginning to read. Geisel saw huge potential in the concept and without consulting the couple, he shortened their names on the cover to “Stan” and “Jan” to make them rhyme; it was Geisel, too, who coined the running title, Berenstain Bears .

Some critics, according to the bible of American children’s literature, Children’s Books and their Creators, “find the cartoon illustrations uninspired, the stories heavy-handed, and Papa Bear’s ineptness offensive”.

Mrs Berenstain countered the critics in an interview after her husband’s death: “Nobody likes making a mother a fall guy. Papa Bear has broad shoulders.”

Bear Country — the Berenstains chose bears “because they can stand up and they look good in clothes and are fun to draw” — is now a commercial empire including a long-running animated TV series, computer games, two stage musicals, a vast range of merchandise and, of course, stuffed toys.

“Papa and Mama are roughly modelled after us,” Berenstain said in 1991. “I’m not quite as dumb as he seems to be sometimes, and Jan is not quite as wise and patient as Mama, but she is Mama.”

Despite the feminist criticism, the Berenstain collaboration was in fact far more equal and efficient than anything Papa Bear could have imagined. Stan would produce the first draft of a story and Jan would edit it. The drawings were also completely collaborative.

Their sons, Leo and Michael, joined the team — many books are simply credited to “the Berenstains” — and will continue to produce more titles with their mother. The couple moved in 1976 to a three-acre hilltop property 40 miles outside Philadelphia, mirroring perfectly the idyll of Bear Country.

“Why would we retire?”, Stan Berenstain wrote in the couple’s autobiography of 2002. “We go to a lovely, salubrious place where honeybees hum, where rainbow trout match rainbow skies, where the rivers run clean and the air is sweet, where there’s beauty around every bend in the sunny dirt road. It’s a wonderful place. It’s called Bear Country. We go there every day.”

Stanley Berenstain is survived by his wife, also 82, two sons and four grandchildren.

Stanley Berenstain, co-creator of Bear Country, was born on September 29, 1923. He died on November 24, 2005, aged 82.