R. L. Stine

R. L. Stine (Robert Lawrence Stine, born 8 October 1943 in Columbus, Ohio) is an American author of horror fiction for children and teenagers, best known as the creator of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series.

After graduating in English from Ohio State University in 1965, Stine created and edited Bananas, a humour magazine for teenagers that Scholastic published for 72 issues between 1975 and 1984, and wrote dozens of joke and humour books for children as Jovial Bob Stine.

His move into teen horror came with Fear Street, which opened in 1989 with The New Girl and ran in its original form until 1999. Goosebumps followed in July 1992 with Welcome to Dead House, developed with Parachute Press and published in the United States by Scholastic and in the UK by Scholastic's Hippo imprint. The original series ran to 62 books before closing in December 1997, and Goosebumps has since sold over 400 million copies in 35 languages. Fear Street has sold more than 80 million. Stine received the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013.

For collectors

The core collecting set is the original run of 62 Goosebumps books (1992 to 1997), beginning with the Scholastic first of Welcome to Dead House (July 1992), together with the first Fear Street title, The New Girl (1989). UK readers met Goosebumps through Scholastic's Hippo imprint, so British first printings form a separate line from the American originals.