Dick and Jane are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp
for a series of basal readers written by William S. Gray to teach
children to read. The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray
Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books
through the final version in 1965. These readers were used in
classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking
countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their
popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students
in the United States used them.