Mr. Popper is a housepainter who lives in the small city of Stillwater. He is a dreamer, and even when he was “painting the outside of […] people’s houses, he would forget what he was doing” (2). The cause of his absentmindedness is that he dreams of visiting other places, such as India or the South Seas. The locations that he is the most interested in visiting are the North and South Poles.

Mr. Popper is happy in Stillwater and loves his wife and two children, Janie and Bill; however, often he wishes that he were a scientist so that he could have gone on Polar expeditions. In order to pursue this interest without being able to travel, Mr. Popper reads voraciously about the Polar explorers and follows the paths of their expeditions on a globe. He watches movies about the Arctic and Antarctic and is quite an expert on these continents and the people who have explored them.

At the end of September, Mr. Popper is happy to arrive home to his small house at 432 Proudfoot Avenue because there will be no more painting work until the spring. This will give him time to read books about his favorite subject, the Poles.