page_title: McGuffey Readers
section_title: Influence
hierarchical_section_title: McGuffey Readers / Influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Set of Henry Ford's McGuffey's Eclectic Readers from the Edison Ford Winter Estates museum
context_page_description: McGuffey Readers were a series of graded primers for grade levels 1-6. They were widely used as textbooks in American schools from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, and are still used today in some private schools and in homeschooling.
  It is estimated that at least 120 million copies of McGuffey's Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary. Since 1961, they have continued to sell at a rate of some 30,000 copies a year. Only the Ray's Arithmetic series matched it in popularity, written by a colleague of McGuffey's and begun in 1834.
context_section_description: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Powers notes that the Readers affected the first mass-educated and 
  mass-literate generation in the modern world. 
  The manufacturer Henry Ford cited McGuffey's Readers as one of his most important childhood influences. He was an avid fan of McGuffey's Readers first editions, and claimed as an adult to be able to quote from McGuffey's by memory at great length. Ford republished all six Readers from the 1867 edition and distributed complete sets of them, at his own expense, to schools across the United States. In 1934, Ford had the log cabin where McGuffey was born moved to Greenfield Village, Ford's museum of Americana at Dearborn, Michigan. In 1936, Ford was an associate editor (along with Hamlin Garland, John W. Studebaker and William F. Wiley) of a collection of excerpts from McGuffey Readers. This 482-page compendium was dedicated to Ford, "lifelong devotee of his boyhood Alma Mater, the McGuffey Readers".
  American composer Burrill Phillips composed a work entitled Selections from McGuffey's Reader, for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.  It was completed in 1933.
caption: Henry Ford's childhood set of McGuffey's Readers
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