Margaret BauerImagine your list of favorite books from eight to 10 years ago. Gone would be “100 Years of Solitude” and “Crime and Punishment,” replaced with such elementary school gems as “Runaway Ralph,” “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” “The Giver” and “Bridge to Terabithia.” All of these belong to that somewhat vague genre known as “young adult fiction,” a section of the bookstore populated by slender, 200-page paperbacks published by Scholastic and vying for the prestigious Newberry Medal Award. You probably read them in your school library between tutorials on how to use the mysterious “card catalog” system, reading the endless permutations of kids stranded on islands, kids learning about death, kids generally “growing up.” Now, over a decade later, we at Cadenza have taken a keen interest in these long-lost young adult fiction authors and decided to do a little research. While we couldn’t present every Beverly Cleary or Matt Christopher, nor every “Sarah, Plain and Tall” or “Summer of the Swans,” we’ve gathered a fine group of aging hippies and grizzled Iditarod racers. As an old Saturday morning show used to say, “Take a look, it’s in a book.”
Theodore Taylor
Notable Books: The Cay, Timothy of the Cay
Official Website: www.theodoretaylor.com
Money Quote: “My father once asked, ‘Do you plan to become a monkey?'”
Ah, the esteemed genre that was the middle-school lost-on-an-island tale. There were such golden classics as “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” which featured a young woman searching-seemingly-endlessly for abalones; there was…um, another one, or two, of whose existence I’m sure but not especially clear on at the moment.
Regardless, the sterling hallmark of the marooned-young-kid oeuvre was-and certainly remains-Theodore Taylor’s classic “The Cay,” in which a young, bratty pre-adolescent is robbed of his sight during a cataclysmic shipwreck (plane crash?) that strands him alone on a desert island (peninsula?). The boy is then helped to safety by an elderly native named “Timothy” (prominently featured in the book’s forgotten sequel, “Timothy of the Cay”), who teaches the kid valuable life lessons about fish-baiting, survival, hepatitis and other good stuff like that.
I don’t really remember much about “The Cay,” aside from liking it, but a visit to the Internet supersite www.theodoretaylor.com reveals that its author is still writing, cavorting and going quite strong in his later years. “I usually work until 4:30 p.m.,” Taylor writes on his site, “seven days a week except for football season. I devote all day autumn Saturdays to college games and watch the pro games on Sunday.”
Taylor’s impressive writerly schedule is a firm inspiration to mine, and the two are eerily similar, aside from the taste for college gridiron and propensity to work. He remains, as his book, a platinum standard for us all.
Gary Paulsen
Notable Books: Hatchet, Dogsong, The Winter Room
Official Website: www.garypaulsen.com
Money Quote: “I was a boy, twelve-years-old, and the most logical thing in the world was to put a walnut on my leg, just above the knee, and smash a screwdriver down through it with a rock. How else would you open a walnut when you don’t have a nutcracker?”
Gary Paulsen has been everything: a drunk, a soldier, an actor, a farmer, a rancher, a truck driver, a trapper and a sailor. He has used these experiences to write more than 175 books already and amazingly still seems to write more. Every former Boy Scout or elementary schooler remembers reading “Hatchet,” the story of a boy stranded in the woods after a plane crash. Are we beginning to see a pattern here? The boy unquestioningly survives the toughs of nature with a mere hatchet, only to appreciate the different food in the supermarket much more and eventually to prefer Canada to society. Paulsen, now 65, has participated in the Iditarod (the 1,180 mile Alaskan dog-sled race) twice and is often sought out on the subject. In a recently played National Public Radio interview, Paulsen discussed his experiences during the race: “The hallucinations become really mean about the third night…At one time, I thought my whole team was on fire.” He went on to comment on a companion riding on his sled: “He was the most boring human being in the world, and I had this bastard on my sled night after night. God! I was ready to kill him.” So in conclusion, if you were to ever bump into old G.P. on the street, you damn well better not bore him or give him PCP.
Lynne Reid Banks
Notable Books: The Indian in the Cupboard, The Key to the Indian, The Return of the Indian, The Mystery of the Cupboard
Official Website: www.lynnereidbanks.com
Money Quote: “All those Bible thumpers who ask where I got the name Omri! He’s in the Book of Kings! They should stop thumping and read it.”
Banks’ timeless story of action figures coming to life in “The Indian in the Cupboard” brought magical fiction to the doorstep, forever changing the fetishism of boy toys. The community of master and slave depicted in the book-the white boy, Omri, manipulating his possession, the Indian-has been suggested to be a metaphor for the capitalist system, a system shunned in Banks’ own life. Upon completion of her first novels in the early 1960s, Banks moved to Israel from her native England to live and work on a kibbutz. Yet, Banks’ life is not entirely full of communal solidarity. Growing up in 1930’s Britain, she was evacuated to Canada at the onset of WWII. Still, she might not be entirely useless to the causes of war. Rumors out of Washington have it that Banks’ ingenious concept of converting material commodities into real life warriors through a means as inexpensive as a cupboard may get her a contract with the Department of Defense. Continuing to write and build on her 40 books, she currently lives in a 300-year old farmhouse in Dorset, England.
Louis Sachar
Notable Books: Sideways Stories from Wayside School
Official Website: www.louissachar.com
Money Quote: “Lucky seems to understand this. He growls at my wife or my daughter if they try to enter when I’m working. Maybe he knows I’m growling on the inside.”
If you spent a significant amount of your elementary school life wishing that your school was a high-rise with a mysterious missing floor and secretly hoping that your next teacher would be named Mrs. Gorf, you were probably a fan of Louis Sachar and his “Wayside School” series, which features such adolescent fiction sensations as “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” and “Wayside School is Falling Down.”
But if you ever hoped that the author was just as wacky as the students and teachers that he writes about, you’re about to be sufficiently disappointed. Louis Sachar is actually a former lawyer who now lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, daughter and two dogs, Lucky and Tippy. He now spends his time writing, taking his dogs to the veterinarian and playing tennis and bridge.
However, if you’re feeling up to a stroll down Louis Sachar memory lane, you can check out the new film adaptation of his book, “Holes,” starring Shia La Beouf, of “Even Stevens” fame, because kids digging holes in the desert is almost as cool as a 30-story school building and a lunch lady who only serves liver.
R.L. Stine
Notable Books: All 87 Goosebumps, the Fear Street series
Official Website: www.scholastic.com/goosebumps
Money Quote: “Kurt Vonnegut’s daughter was a big ‘Goosebumps’ fan. When she was 12 she told her father, ‘Oh, he’s a much better writer than you, Dad.'”
If there’s a distinctly ’90s young adult fiction author, it’s certainly RL Stine (Robert Lawrence, for those who were always interested). Back when we were first discovering the joys of literature, Stine was there to make sure our reading material was short, scary and completely disposable. As soon as you read one Goosebumps book, whether “The Haunted Mask,” “Monster Blood (Pts I-IV)” or perhaps “Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes,” the man had already written roughly seven new books. Even today, Stine writes one book every two weeks, which would seem physically impossible without the aid of massive amounts of amphetamines or perhaps a secret headquarters full of Oompa Loompas. No matter how he accomplishes his amazing feats, one would expect a man who frightens children for a living to be a pretty sick individual. As a matter of (quite boring) fact, he’s a rather nebbish-looking man with big glasses and several prominent moles who lives a quiet life with his family in New York. Whether or not he drinks goat’s blood and holds Black Masses remains unknown.
Soren Kierkegaard
Notable Books: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death
Money Quote: “Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth, look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”
As the father of existentialism, Kierkegaard delved deep into the questions of subjectivity and the ability to unite the infinite and finite selves. In seminal works such as “Fear and Trembling,” he revealed conventional Christianity to be a “religion of nincompoops” and stressed the fact that the Christian God is irreconcilably irrational and immoral in the context of a rational ethics scheme. He left us with that burning question, “Can there be a teleological suspension of the ethical?” He has been dead since 1855.