That led to speculation about what such a life might be like. Brown said he would most likely wake up flat. One asked what would happen if the big bulletin board on the wall were to fall on J. and Tony were young and stalling for time. The idea for Stanley came to him one night at bedtime when his sons J. Preferring to write himself, he sold fiction and articles to national magazines while working at The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and finally at Warner Books, where he was a senior editor until 1980. In Hollywood he worked for the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. A graduate of the Professional Children's School, he provided a child's voice in a radio drama and appeared onstage.

Originally a child actor, he became Jeff Brown because Actors Equity already had a Richard Brown as a member. Jeff Brown was born Richard Chester Brown. In translation, he traveled to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Israel, among other places. The character's life extended further, as schoolchildren mailed cut-outs of him to their friends. All together, Stanley's tales have sold nearly a million copies in the United States alone. The last, 'Stanley, Flat Again!,' was published the year he died. Flat Stanley became the star of a series of perpetually popular books. Jeff Brown had worked in Hollywood and as an editor and writer in New York before creating Flat Stanley, a hero for the youngest readers whose adventures, with illustrations by Tomi Ungerer, were first published in 1964. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown