COLUMBUS, Ohio – OSU students receiving diplomas at autumn commencement next month will hear from an alumnus who began his journey to the bestseller list on campus and became world-famous around the time they were born.
The Ohio State University announced that award-winning author R. L. Stine, creator of the Goosebumps series of horror novels for young readers, will address some of his biggest fans as the speaker for Ohio State’s autumn 2013 commencement on Dec. 15 in the Jerome Schottenstein Center.
A Bexley native, Stine earned his B.A. in English in 1965 from Ohio State. After graduation, he moved to New York to begin his writing career. Since then, he has written more than 300 books for children and young adults, which have sold over 350 million copies.
Many of the estimated 2,500 graduates were born in 1992, the same year Stine began writing the Goosebumps books.
During his days as a student, Stine was editor-in-chief of The Sundial, the university’s student-produced humor magazine, where he began writing under the name “Jovial” Bob Stine.
In the mid-1970s he created Bananas, a humor magazine for teens published by Scholastic Inc. In 1989, Stine created the Fear Street series of horror books for young adults. Fear Street, which told the stories of teens facing scary situations at Shadyside High School, grew to include roughly 100 novels, eventually selling more than 80 million copies.
In 1992, Stine began writing the Goosebumps series, which became best-sellers in the U.S. and abroad – translated into 32 languages.