Mary Engelbreit

Mary Engelbreit (born June 5, 1952) is a graphic artist and children's book illustrator who launched her own magazine, Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion in 1996. Mary Engelbreit was born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, North America. She began her career by designing and creating greeting cards, for which she eventually became famous. Later on she wrote and illustrated children's books.

Engelbreit attributes her beginnings in art to getting eyeglasses in second grade and being able to see details of the world around her clearly for the first time. After meeting her first artist, at age 9, she became convinced she needed her own studio space, which her mother helped set up in the family linen closet.

Interested in art throughout her school years, Engelbreit eventually began to work for a local advertising company, Hot Buttered Graphics. Hoping to work as an illustrator of children's books, she shopped her portfolio around New York City without success. At the suggestion of one art director, she began working in greeting cards; her first nationally distributed greeting card featured a malapropism that played off an old saying, "Life is just a bowl of cherries", showing a girl looking at a chair piled high with bowls, with the legend: "Life is just a chair of bowlies." She began in St.Louis. She also sold her greeting cards, and it was a hit in University City. It was called: "...a vast empire of cuteness!"

Engelbreit married Phil Delano, a social worker, in 1977; in 1986, they formed their own company, presently called Mary Engelbreit Studios. The couple has had two children: Evan, born 1980; and Will, born 1983. Evan died in June 2000. He left behind a daughter, Mikayla, who Mary and Phil adopted as their own daughter. Engelbreit has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.