30 years and 65 books later, Mary Pope Osborne reflects on ‘Magic Tree House’


By Elena Nicolaou
Senior entertainment editor at Today.com
Mary Pope Osborne, who has been writing the series for 30 years and was working on her 65th installment at the time of this interview, said I'm hardly the first person who has told her that "Magic Tree House" impacted them. Speaking to TODAY, Osborne recalled a particularly memorable encounter with a reader, now all grown up.
At the time, she was in a parking lot grocery store. A fan, she said, started calling her name and ran across the parking lot. "She burst into tears and said, 'You got me through a troubled childhood,'" she said. "It was so powerful, that one line: 'You got me through a troubled childhood.'"
Osborne recently compiled her wisdom of 30 years of writing the “Magic Tree House” series in a book called “Memories and Life Lessons from the Magic Tree House” out earlier this year.
Below, we caught up with Osborne about a lifetime with Jack and Annie.