Fredric Wertham, until Congressional hearings led to the mid-1950s self-censorship and rapid shrinkage of the comics industry.) Edgar Hoover, John Mason Brown, and most notably Dr. Barely two years after the introduction of Superman, North wrote that comics were 'a poisonous mushroom growth of the last two years' and that comic book publishers were 'guilty of a cultural slaughter of the innocents.' (These charges were echoed over the following 15 years by other public figures like J. In 1940, in his position as Chicago Daily News Literary Editor, North was one of the first public figures to denounce the newly popular medium of comic books. Writing careerĪfter attending the University of Chicago (he left without graduating in 1929), North worked as a reporter (eventually literary editor) for the Chicago Daily News, the New York World-Telegram, and the New York Sun, before becoming a full-time freelance writer. This writing effort was at the same time as the setting of Rascal and may have been an early literary inspiration to North. One of these uncles was Justus Henry Nelson, an early missionary in the Amazon Basin. When Sterling North was 11 (in 1917, which would have been the year of his maternal grandfather's 100th birthday), several of his uncles wrote extended biographies about their parents and their pioneer farm life. North had three siblings: two sisters, Jessica Nelson North who was an author, poet, and editor Theo (Theodora), who was the martinet in the family and a brother, Herschel, who survived World War I. Surviving a near-paralyzing struggle with polio in his teens, he grew to young adulthood in the quiet southern Wisconsin village of Edgerton, which North transformed into the 'Brailsford Junction' setting of several of his books. North was born on the second floor of a farmhouse on the shores of Lake Koshkonong, a few miles from Edgerton, Wisconsin, in 1906.

Sarah died when Sterling was seven years old. She married David Willard North, also the product of a pioneering local family, whose brother ran the family farm.

His daughter, Sarah Elizabeth 'Elizabeth' Nelson, was Sterling North's mother. Born in Putnam County, New York, James moved first to near Rochester, New York, then to Menomonee Falls, in Waukesha County, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee), then pioneered a farm near present-day South Wayne, in southwestern Wisconsin. North's maternal grandparents, James Hervey Nelson and Sarah Orelup Nelson, were Wisconsin pioneers.

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