Stephen Slesinger

Stephen Slesinger (December 25, 1901 – December 17, 1953), was an American radio, television and film producer, creator of comic strip characters and the father of the licensing industry. From 1923 to 1953, he created, produced, published, developed, licensed or represented several popular literary legends of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

Slesinger was born on December 25, 1901, in New York; He was a third generation New Yorker of Hungarian and Russian ancestry. His father, Anthony, was a dress manufacturer, and his mother, Augusta (née Singer), was a prominent psychoanalyst. He studied at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School from September 1914 until June 1919 and later attended Columbia University. His younger sister was the author and screenwriter Tess Slesinger.

Slesinger died at 4:45am on December 17, 1953, of gastric hemorrhage at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, only eight days before he would have turned 52.

In 1927, Slesinger set up shop in New York as a literary agent, and went on to represent, among others, Newbery Medal-winning writers Hendrik Willem van Loon (who won the first Newbery Medal in 1922), Western authors Zane Grey and Rex Beach, Will James and journalist Andy Rooney. Slesinger acquired the rights to popularize illustrations, texts, characters and personalities in other media, a pioneering effort into ancillary rights uses and licensing. Always interested in new media, Slesinger took out patents for experimental television presentations of cartoons and presented Winnie the Pooh as the first Sunday morning TV cartoon in the mid-1940s. (The New York TImes)

Slesinger acquired US and Canadian merchandising, television, recording and other trade rights to Winnie-the-Pooh from A. A. Milne in the 1930s, and developed Winnie-the-Pooh commercializations for more than 30 years, creating the first Pooh doll, record, board game, puzzle, US radio broadcast (NBC), animation, and motion picture film. In the 1950s, after Slesinger's death, his widow, Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, took over the business and launched her own nationwide licensing campaigns. In 1961 and 1983, Stephen Slesinger, Inc. licensed certain Pooh rights to the Walt Disney Company.

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