‘Nate the Great’ series captured kids’ imagination

Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, who helped children discover the joys of reading with more than two dozen books in her Nate the Great series about a pancake-eating boy detective, died March

12 at a hospital in Munster, Indiana. She was 90.

The cause was respiratory failure, said her son Andrew Sharmat.

Sharmat wrote or cowrote more than 130 books for young readers, her audiences ranging from children just learning to sound out words to adolescents peering into the grown-up world. Of all her characters, the best known was Nate the Great, who debuted in 1972 and became a favorite of the preschool and early elementary set.

Her books about Nate, who was named after Sharmat’s father, sold 15 million copies, according to Penguin Random House. Many of those volumes featured pictures by the Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator Marc Simont. He often depicted Sharmat’s hero clad in a trench coat and deerstalker, a look of concentration on his face, his trusty dog Sludge by his side.

Sharmat chronicled Nate’s gumshoeing in titles including “Nate the Great and the Lost List” (1975), “Nate the Great and the Missing Key” (1981), “Nate the Great and the Fishy Prize” (1985), “Nate the Great and the Musical Note” (1990), “Nate the Great, San Francisco Detective” (2000) and “Nate the Great, Where Are You?” (2014).

Nate was featured in “Got milk?” advertisements by the dairy industry and on Cheerios cereal boxes for a literacy campaign.

Sharmat collaborated on her books with her husband, Mitchell Sharmat, who was the author of “Gregory, the Terrible Eater” (1980); her sons, Andrew and Craig Sharmat; and her sister, Rosalind Weinman. With her husband, she wrote several books featuring Olivia Sharp, Nate the Great’s cousin and a detective in her own right.