The longest time I spent in one school was for about five months. I was an 'Army brat,' and it was a miserable life. School was a nightmare because I was unbelievably shy, and terrible at sports. I wound up skipping most of the ninth grade. Eventually Paulsen was sent again to live with relatives, and worked to support himself with jobs as a newspaperboy and as a pin-setter in a bowling alley. Things began to change for the better during his teen years. He found security and support with his grandmother and aunts, "safety nets" as he once described them.
A turning point in Paulsen's life came one sub-zero winter day when, as he was walking past the public library, he decided to stop in to warm himself.
I can't even describe how liberating it was. She recommended westerns and science fiction but every now and then would slip in a classic. I roared through everything she gave me and in the summer read a book a day.
It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five-gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. From to , Paulsen attended Bemidji College in Minnesota, paying for his tuition with money he'd earned as a trapper for the state of Minnesota.
He served in the U. Army from to , and worked with missiles. After the Army, he took extension courses to become a certified field engineer, and found work in the aerospace departments of the Bendix and Lockheed corporations. There it occurred to him that he might try and become a writer. And I thought: What the hell, I am an engineering writer.
But, conversely, I also realized I didn't know a thing about writing--professionally. After several hours of hard thinking, a way to earn came to me. All I had to do was go to work editing a magazine.
Creating a fictitious resume, Paulsen was able to obtain an associate editor position at a men's magazine in Hollywood, California. Although it soon became apparent to his employers that he had no editorial experience, "they could see I was serious about wanting to learn, and they were willing to teach me," Paulsen once said. He spent nearly a year with the magazine, finding it "the best of all possible ways to learn about writing.
It probably did more to improve my craft and ability than any other single event in my life. I didn't feel I could do justice to both. Paulsen's first book, The Special War, was published in , and he soon proved himself to be one of the most prolific authors in the United States. In little over a decade, working mainly out of northern Minnesota, he published nearly forty books and close to articles and stories for magazines.
Among Paulsen's diverse titles were a number of children's nonfiction books about animals, a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. On a bet with a friend, he once wrote eleven articles and short stories inside four days and sold all of them. To burn off tension, he took long walks around his Minnesota farm during which, as he told Serdahely, he would "blow the hell out of a hillside" with a rifle. His prolific output was interrupted by a libel lawsuit brought against his young adult novel Winterkill.
Paulsen eventually won the case, but, as he once observed, "the whole situation was so nasty and ugly that I stopped writing. I wanted nothing more to do with publishing and burned my bridges, so to speak. It's not pleasant, but it's humane, if death can be humane. After Francis escapes from the tribe, a one-armed fur trader named Jason Grimes continues the young teen's frontier education.
The White Fox Chronicles is a departure for Paulsen in its futuristic setting and a plot that a Publishers Weekly reviewer likened to that of a "shoot-'em-up computer game.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that the work will cause readers to "cheer on the good guys without ever fearing that they might not triumph in the end. The prolific author, having published over five decades, shows no signs of slowing down by the early s. Paulsen follows a rigorous writing schedule, which he related to Sharon Miller Cindrich in the Writer: "Eighteen hours a day, seven days a week for about ten years.
Writers like me are extinct. People don't do that anymore. They don't study. The dedication, obsession, the compulsion-driven need to be like me is just not done anymore.
I just work. It's my nature. The stories are like a river that's going by all the time, and I just 'bucket in' and up comes a story. It's a cliche, but it's like that. Paulsen's concern with literacy is personal: he still believes, as he told David Gale in a School Library Journal interview celebrating his Margaret A.
Edwards Award, that "there's nothing that has happened to me that would have happened if a librarian hadn't got me to read All of our knowledge, everything we are—is locked up in books, and if you can't read, it's lost. It is exactly this empathic power that has made him such a popular and respected author. As Gary M. Salvner commented in Writers for Young Adults: "Whether angry or happy, whether writing about survival or growing up, Gary Paulsen is always a hopeful writer, for he believes that young people must be respected as they are guided into adulthood.
And he continues to write enthusiastically, commenting that he has 'fallen in love with writing, with the dance of it. In awarding the writer the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the award committee, as noted in School Library Journal, commented on this empathetic trait: "With his intense love of the outdoors and crazy courage born of adversity, Paulsen reached young adults everywhere. His writing conveys respect for their intelligence and ability to overcome life's worst realities.
As Paulsen himself has said, 'I know if there is any hope at all for the human race, it has to come from young people.
Drew, Bernard A. Booklist, November 1, , p. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, , pp. Kirkus Reviews, July 15, , review of The Crossing, p. Kliatt, May, , p. Marcus, interview with Paulsen, p. School Library Journal, October, , p. Wysocki, review of Soldier's Heart, p. Writers' Digest, January, , F. Serdahely, "Prolific Paulsen," July, , pp. James Press Detroit, MI , Salvner, Gary M. That lifetime contribution will extend far beyond his own life as coming generations continue to be inspired and enlightened by his words.
He was an extraordinary writer, a towering figure in our world. Admin Dashboard. Remembering Gary Paulsen Gary Paulsen, author, adventurer, and inspiration to generations of young readers, died October 13 at his home in New Mexico.
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