Mary Pope Osborne, American author of children’s books, was born May 20, 1949, in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Her father was military and as a child she lived in Oklahoma, Virginia and Austria before his retirement, and they settled in North Carolina. She grew up with a sister Natalie, her twin brother Bill and a younger brother Michael.

She graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1971, where she began studying drama and graduated with a degree in religion. She traveled extensively after graduation including eleven countries throughout Asia. When she came back to the States, she met her husband Will Osborne and they married in 1976 and settled in New York.

Mary held several different jobs before her writing career started when she published her first book “Run, Run As Fast As You Can” in 1982. She has written almost one hundred books including young adult novels, picture books, biographies, mysteries and is most famous for her Magic Tree House Series, which she began writing in 1992. As of 2017, the series sold more than 134 million copies worldwide. The first book was “Dinosaurs Before Dark” and now there are more than 60 Magic Tree House books.

Mary is co-author of the Magic Tree House Fact Tracker Series along with her husband Will Osborne and her sister Natalie Pope Boyce. The first two non-fiction books in this series were published in 2000. Mary loved reading as a child and her mother, being a 2nd grade teacher, read with her children and took them to the library. Mary still loves to read and has more than two thousand books in her home library.

Mary and Will now live in Connecticut in a home on a lake where they love to kayak and hike with their dogs.

We have some 75 copies of her books, including the Magic Tree House Series and Fact Tracker Series.