After just barely graduating from high school in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, in 1959, Paulsen attended Bemidji College in Minnesota, for two years, paying for his tuition with money he'd earned as a trapper for the state of Minnesota. When he flunked out of college, he joined the U.S. Army, serving from 1959 to 1962, and working with missiles. After his tour of duty was completed, he took extension courses to become a certified field engineer, finding work in the aerospace departments of the Bendix and Lockheed corporations. There it occurred to him that he might try and become a writer. "I'd finished reading a magazine article on flight-testing . . . and thought, gad, what a way to make a living—writing about something you like and getting paid for it!" he told F. Serdahely in Writer's Digest. "I remembered writing some of my past reports, some fictionalized versions I'd included. 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 learn came to me. All I had to do was go to work editing a magazine."
facts about gary paulsen.
