The Boxcar Children

The Boxcar Children is a classic children's literary franchise originally created and written by the American first-grade school teacherGertrude Chandler Warner. Today, the series includes well over 150 titles. The series is aimed at readers in grades 2–6.

Originally published in 1924 by Rand McNally (as The Box-Car Children) and reissued in a shorter revised form in 1942 by Albert Whitman & Company,The Boxcar Children tells the story of four orphaned children, Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny. They create a home for themselves in an abandoned boxcar in the forest. They eventually meet their grandfather, who is a wealthy and kind man (although the children had believed him to be cruel). The children decide to live with the grandfather, who moves the beloved boxcar to his backyard so the children can use it as a playhouse. The book was turned into a movie, The Boxcar Children, in the fall of 2015, and the book Surprise Island will be turned into a movie during the fall of 2017. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the original book one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children". In 2012 the original novel was ranked among the all-time "Top 100 Chapter Books", or children's novels, in a survey published by School Library Journal.

In the subsequent books, the children encounter many adventures and mysteries in their neighborhood or at the locations they visit with their grandfather. The majority of the books are set in locations the children are visiting over school holidays such as summer vacation or Christmas break. Only the first 19 stories were written by creator Warner. Other books in the series have been written by other writers, but always feature the byline "Created by Gertrude Chandler Warner". The recent books in the series are set in the present day, whereas most of the original books were set in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Boxcar Children tells the story of four orphaned children: Henry, Jessie (or Jess), Violet, and Benny. In the 1924 version of the tale, the children are orphaned in the first few pages; in the heavily revised and simplified 1942 revision, they have evidently been orphaned for some time.

When a baker and his wife learn that the children are orphans, they make plans the children object to. In the 1924 edition, they plan to send the children, who live in a house next door to the bakery, to live with their grandfather, but the children have been brought up to fear their grandfather, whom they have never met, because he did not approve of their parents' marriage. In the 1942 version, the children are already homeless and wandering around at the start of the story. The baker and his wife plan to take the three elder children, who are old enough to be helpful in the bakery, but to send the youngest, Benny to a Children's Home.

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