R.L. Stine | Biography, Books, & Facts | Britannica (2025)

R.L. Stine (born October 8, 1943, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.) is an American novelist who was best known for his horror books for children, including the Goosebumps and Fear Street series.

Stine graduated from the Ohio State University in 1965, having served three years as editor of the campus humour magazine, the Sundial. After teaching junior high school for a year, he went to New York City, where he eventually landed an editorial job with Scholastic Books. He worked there for 16 years on various children’s magazines, notably Bananas, a humour magazine for older age groups. The first of Stine’s more than 40 humour books for children, The Absurdly Silly Encyclopedia & Fly Swatter (1978), was published under the pseudonym Jovial Bob Stine.

His first scary novel, Blind Date, was released in 1986 and launched Stine’s career as a horror writer. His Fear Street series of stories for young teens began with The New Girl (1989), and the Goosebumps series for age 8 to 11 was launched with Welcome to Dead House (1992); the latter series inspired the television program Goosebumps (1995–98). The unpredictability, plot twists, and cliff-hanger endings of his horror writing relied on surprise, avoided the seriously threatening topics of modern urban life, and delivered to kids what Stine termed “a safe scare.” Both series were an immediate success.

Stine launched various spin-off series, including Give Yourself Goosebumps (1995), a choose-your-own-scary-adventure line, and The Nightmare Room (2000), which was adapted for television and aired in 2001–02. He also penned a number of series related to Fear Street, including Fear Street Super Chillers (1991), Fear Street Seniors (1998), and Return to Fear Street (2018). In 2008 Stine revived the haunted dummy, a classic Goosebumps character, in the first book of the Goosebumps Horrorland series, titled Revenge of the Living Dummy. Four years later the Goosebumps Most Wanted series debuted.

Stine’s other notable series included Point Horror (1986) and Rotten School (2005). He also wrote numerous short stories, some of which inspired the TV series The Haunting Hour (2010–14). Other works included When Good Ghouls Go Bad (2001; TV movie 2001) and Monsterville: Cabinet of Souls (2016; film 2015). By the second decade of the 21st century, Stine had sold more than 400 million copies of his children’s books. In addition, he penned several novels for adults, including Superstitious (1995), Eye Candy (2004; television series 2015), and Red Rain (2012).

Stine was played by actor Jack Black in the film Goosebumps (2015) and Goosebumps 2 (2018), in which the author’s terrifying characters come to life.