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BIO
Born
May 17, 1939, Gary Paulsen is one of America's most popular writers
for young people. Although he was never a dedicated student,
Paulsen developed a passion for reading at an early age. After a
librarian gave him a book to read --- along with his own library
card --- he was hooked. He began spending hours alone in the basement
of his apartment building, reading one book after another.
Running away from home at the age of 14 and traveling with a carnival,
Paulsen acquired a taste for adventure. A youthful summer of rigorous
chores on a farm; jobs as an engineer, construction worker, ranch
hand, truck driver, and sailor; and two rounds of the 1,180-mile
Alaskan dog sled race, the Iditarod; have provided ample material
from which he creates his powerful stories.
Paulsen's realization that he would become a writer came suddenly
when he was working as a satellite technician for an aerospace firm
in California. One night he walked off the job, never to return.
He spent the next year in Hollywood as a magazine proofreader, working
on his own writing every night. Then he left California and drove
to northern Minnesota where he rented a cabin on a lake; by the
end of the winter, he had completed his first novel.
It is Paulsen's overwhelming belief in young people that drives
him to write. His intense desire to tap deeply into the human spirit
and to encourage readers to observe and care about the world around
them has brought him both enormous popularity with young people
and critical acclaim from the children's book community. Paulsen
is a master storyteller who has written more than 175 books and
some 200 articles and short stories for children and adults. He
is one of the most important writers of young adult literature today
and three of his novels--Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room-were
Newbery Honor Books. His books frequently appear on the best books
lists of the American Library Association.
Living in the remote Minnesota woods, Paulsen eventually turned
to the sport of dog racing, and entered the 1983 Iditarod. In 1985,
after running the Iditarod for the second time, he suffered an attack
of angina and was forced to give up his dogs. "I started to focus
on writing the same energies and efforts that I was using with dogs.
So we're talking 18-, 19-, 20-hour days completely committed to
work. Totally, viciously, obsessively committed to work, the way
I'd run dogs.... I still work that way, completely, all the time.
I just work. I don't dank, I don't fool around, I'm just this way....
The end result is there's a lot of books out there."
Paulsen has received many letters from readers (as many as 200 a
day) telling him they felt Brian Robeson's story in HATCHET was
left unfinished by his early rescue, before the winter came and
made things really tough. They wanted to know what would happen
if Brian were not rescued, if he had to survive in the winter. Paulsen
says, "Since my life has been one of survival in winter--running
two Iditarods, hunting and trapping as a boy and young man--the
challenge became interesting, and so I researched and wrote BRIAN'S
WINTER, showing what could and perhaps would have happened had Brian
not been rescued."
Paulsen's book SOLDIER'S HEART came out in September 1998. In this
heartwrenching story, Paulsen brings the Civil War to life battle
by battle, as readers see the horror of combat and its devastating
results through the eyes of 15-year-old Charley Goddard.
Paulsen and his wife, Ruth Wright Paulsen, an artist who has illustrated
several of his books, divide their time between a home in New Mexico
and a boat in the Pacific.
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