Mr. Popper's Penguins

Florence lived until the age of eighty-three and died in 1979. Mr. Popper’s Penguins remained a bestselling book throughout her lifetime, and has enchanted children and adults for over seventy years.

After two publishers rejected the book, Florence rewrote the story, keeping many parts the same but adding more realistic events. (In the version written by Richard Atwater, Mr. Popper draws a penguin on a mirror with shaving cream and it comes to life!) The revised manuscript was accepted and published in 1938.

Richard had completed a manuscript called Ork! The Story of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, when he suffered a severe stroke in 1934 and was forced to stop writing. He lived until 1948, but could never write again. So Florence took over.

His second was a children’s operetta called The King’s Sneezes.

Florence Hasseltine Carroll was born in 1896 in Chicago, Illinois. She also obtained two degrees at the University of Chicago, where her Classical Greek teacher was a young man named Richard Atwater!

studied at the University of Chicago and taught Greek there while in graduate school

In 1932, Richard Atwater and his wife, Florence, took their two daughters to see a documentary film about Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic expedition. Mr. Atwater was very impressed by the movie, and he decided to write a book about the penguins from Antarctica. When one of his daughters objected to children’s books about history, he started to write a magical story about a group of penguins, which would later become Mr. Popper’s Penguins.

The sailors all took the greatest delight in watching the curious little birds at their explorations.

“It looks as if this will be a pretty lively trip,” they would say. “These Popper Penguins certainly live up to their reputation.”

The two of them were kept very busy showing and explaining everything to Nelson, Columbus, Louisa, Jenny, Scott, Magellan, Adelina, Isabella, Ferdinand, and Victoria.

Captain Cook was already quite familiar with the ship, since it was the same one the Admiral had sailed to the South Pole, where Captain Cook had often seen it. Greta, too, had seen vessels of its kind.