classroom throughout the 1970s, they were replaced with other reading texts and gradually disappeared from use in schools. In her retirement Sharp traveled and remained active in the education field. She divided her time between California and Indiana, where she established a home in her later years at Frankfort. Death and legacy Sharp died at Wesley Manor nursing home in Frankfort, Indiana, on June 17, 1981, at the age of ninety-one. Her remains are interred at a local cemetery. Sharp's legacy was the Dick and Jane readers of the mid-twentieth century, the successors to the phonics-based McGuffey Readers that were popular from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In 1967, two years after Scott Foresman retired the Dick and Jane series, the company introduced its Open Highways series, which included heavily illustrated classic children's stories and poems, as well as placing greater emphasis on multicultural content and phonics training in its subsequent readers. The Dick and Jane primers that Sharp edited, which were well known for their simple narrative text and watercolor illustrations, taught reading to millions of students for four decades. Despite the challenges and criticisms of these readers, their content, and the look-say format they used to teach reading, Sharp's characters of "Dick," "Jane," and "Sally" became household words and the primers became icons of mid-century American culture, as well as collectors' items. References External links Zerna Addas Sharp at Find A Grave American children's writers 1889 births 1981 deaths People from Clinton County, Indiana American women children's writers