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justin moore

Gary Paulsen: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article - 0 views

www.absoluteastronomy.com/...Gary_Paulsen

cjhs author gary paulsen

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    this is a overview of gfarypaulsen...
justin moore

Gary Paulsen: Biography from Answers.com - 0 views

www.answers.com/...-children-s-author-illustrator

cjhs author gary paulsen

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  • A writer of popular and finely wrought young adult novels and nonfiction with sales totaling more than three million worldwide, Gary Paulsen joined a select group of YA writers when he received the 1997 Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring an author's lifetime achievement in writing books for teens. His work is widely praised by critics, and he has been awarded Newbery Medal Honor Book citations for three of his books, Dogsong, Hatchet, and The Winter Room.
  • In prose lean and echoing of Hemingway, Paulsen creates powerful young adult fiction, often set in wilderness or rural areas and featuring teenagers who arrive at self-awareness by way of experiences in nature—through challenging tests of their own survival instincts—or through the ministrations of understanding adults. He displays an "extraordinary ability to picture for the reader how man's comprehension of life can be transformed with the lessons of nature," wrote Evie Wilson in Voice of Youth Advocates. "With humor and psychological genius, Paulsen develops strong adolescent characters who lend new power to youth's plea to be allowed to apply individual skills in their risk-taking." In addition to writing young adult fiction, Paulsen has also authored numerous picture books with his illustrator wife R. W. Paulsen, penned children's nonfiction, and authored two plays and many works of adult fiction and nonfiction.
  • Paulsen was born in Minnesota in 1939, the son of first-generation Danish and Swedish parents. During his childhood, he saw little of his father, who served in the military in Europe during World War II, and little of his mother, who worked in a Chicago ammunitions factory. "I was reared by my grandmother and several aunts," he once told Something about the Author. "I first saw my father when I was seven in the Philippines where my parents and I lived from 1946 to 1949." Writing of that experience a half century later in Riverbank Review, Paulsen noted that he "lived essentially as a street child in Manila, because my parents were alcoholics and I was not supervised. The effect was profound and lasting."
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • When the family returned to the United States, Paulsen suffered from being continually uprooted. "We moved around constantly....The longest time I spent in one school was for about five months," Paulsen once told SATA. "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." In addition to problems at school, he faced many ordeals at home. "My father drank a lot, and there would be terrible arguments," he noted. Eventually Paulsen was sent again to live with relatives and worked to support himself with jobs as a newspaper boy 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 described them in his interview. A turning point in his life came one sub-zero winter day when, as he was walking past the public library, he decided to stop in to warm himself. "To my absolute astonishment the librarian walked up to me and asked if I wanted a library card," he related. "When she handed me the card, she handed me the world. 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."
  • 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."
  • Creating a fictitious resume, Paulsen was able to obtain an associate editor position on a men's magazine in Hollywood, California. Although it soon became apparent to his employers that he had no editorial experience, he once told SATA that "they could see I was serious about wanting to learn, and they were willing to teach me." 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." Still living in California, Paulsen also found work as a film extra (he once played a drunken Indian in a movie called Flap), and took up sculpting as a hobby, even winning first prize in a local exhibition.
  • Paulsen's first book, The Special War, was published in 1966, 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—where he returned after becoming disillusioned with Hollywood—he published nearly forty books and close to two hundred 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., several humorous titles under the "Sports on the Light Side" series published by Raintree Press, two plays, adult fiction and nonfiction, as well as some initial ventures into juvenile fiction. On a bet with a friend, he once wrote eleven articles and short stories inside four days and sold all of them.H
  • prolific output was interrupted by a libel lawsuit brought against his 1977 young adult novel Winterkill, the powerful story of a semi-delinquent boy befriended by a hard-bitten cop named Duda in a small Minnesota town. Paulsen eventually won the case, but, as he noted, "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." Unable to earn any other type of living, he went back to trapping for the state of Minnesota, working his sixty-mile trap line on foot or skis.
  • To help Paulsen in his hunting job, a friend gave him a team of sled dogs, a gift that ultimately had a profound influence on Paulsen. "One day, about midnight, we were crossing Clear Water Lake, which is about three miles long," Paulsen recounted. "There was a full moon shining so brightly on the snow you could read by it. There was no one around, and all I could hear was the rhythm of the dogs' breathing as they pulled the sled." The intensity of the moment prompted an impulsive seven-day trip by Paulsen through northern Minnesota. "I didn't go home—my wife was frantic—I didn't check lines, I just ran the dogs....For food, we had a few beaver carcasses. . . . I was initiated into this incredibly ancient and very beautiful bond, and it was as if everything that had happened to me before ceased to exist." Paulsen afterwards made a resolution to permanently give up hunting and trapping, and proceeded to pursue dogsled racing as a hobby. He went so far as to enter the grueling twelve-hundred-mile Iditarod race in Alaska, an experience that later provided the basis for his award-winning novel Dogsong.
  • well."
  • Paulsen's 1987 novel Hatchet, also a Newbery honor book, tells the story of Brian, a thirteen-year-old thoroughly modern boy who is forced to survive alone in the Canadian woods after a plane crash. Like Russel in Dogsong, Hatchet's hero is also transformed by the wilderness. "By the time he is rescued, Brian is permanently changed," noted Suzanne Rahn in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers; "he is far more observant and thoughtful, and knows what is really important in his life." As noted in Children's Books and Their Creators, Hatchet became "one of the most popular adventure stories of all time," combining "elementary language with a riveting plot to produce a book both comprehensible and enjoyable for those children who frequently equate reading with frustration."
  • Hatchet proved so popular with readers that they demanded, and won, a number of sequels: The River, Brian's Winter, Brian's Return, and Brian's Hunt. In Brian's Hunt, Paulsen "delivers a gripping, gory tale about survival in the north woods, based on a real bear attack," noted Paula Rohrlick in Kliatt.
  • In My Life in Dog's Years, The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer, Eastern Sun, Winter Moon, and Guts: The True Stories behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, Paulsen recounts stories from his own life, many of which he has fictionalized in his young adult books. While most of the remembrances are intended for an adult audience, one of his most powerful memoirs for young readers is Woodsong, an autobiographical account of his life in Minnesota and Alaska while preparing his sled dogs to run the Iditarod. A reviewer noted in Horn Book that the "lure of the wilderness is always a potent draw, and Paulsen evokes its mysteries as well as anyone since Jack London." In another memoir intended for a young adult audience, How Angel Peterson Got His Name and Other Outrageous Tales about Extreme Sports, Paulsen recalls a number of daredevil stunts he and his friends performed during their early teen years. "Paulsen laces his tales with appealing '50s details and broad asides about the boys' personalities, ingenuity, and idiocy," noted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly.
  • Paulsen tells of a different kind of growing up in Harris and Me: A Summer Remembered. Instead of the main character reaching maturity while struggling in the wilderness, in Harris the unnamed protagonist discovers a sense of belonging while spending a summer on his relatives' farm. A child of abusive and alcoholic parents, the young narrator is sent to live with another set of relations—his uncle's family—and there he meets the reckless Harris, who leads him in escapades involving playing Tarzan in the loft of the barn and using pig pens as the stage for G.I. Joe games. "Through it all," explained a reviewer for Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, "the lonely hero imperceptibly learns about belonging." In Voice of Youth Advocates, Penny Blubaugh pointed out that "for the first time in his life [the narrator] finds himself surrounded by love."
  • In books like Nightjohn and Mr. Tucket Paulsen draws on history for literary inspiration. Nightjohn is set in the nineteenth-century South and revolves around Sarny, a young slave girl who risks severe punishment when she is persuaded to learn to read by Nightjohn, a runaway slave who has just been recaptured. A commentator for Kirkus Reviews called Nightjohn "a searing picture of slavery" and an "unbearably vivid book."Sarny is reprised as a character in Sarny: A Life Remembered, in which the former slave narrates her life in 1930, at the ripe old age of ninety-four. A focal point of the woman's story is the fact that she learned to read: this saves her on more than one occasion. Sarny' "story makes absorbing reading," concluded Bruce Anne Shook in a School Library Journal review.
  • justin moore on 25 Apr 11
     
    About Gary paulsen point of veiw over his own very popular stories of Hachete, something, an somthing...
jarred hatchette

LitLovers - Swindle Discussion Questions - Book Review - Book Club Guide - 0 views

www.litlovers.com/...1014-swindle-korman

about the author

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    Gordon Korman was born in Montreal, Canada, and grew up in the Toronto area. Since he had no brothers, sisters, or pets, he started writing to keep himself entertained. Then his 7th-grade English teacher gave the class an exciting assignment: "He gave us four months-45 minutes a day!-to work on the story of our choice. My project was This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, which became my first published book. I happened to be the class monitor for the Scholastic TAB Book Club, so I figured I was practically a Scholastic employee already! I sent my novel to the address on the TAB flyer, and a few days after my 14th birthday, I had a book contract with Scholastic." By the time Korman graduated from high school, he had published five other novels and several articles for Canadian newspapers. He then moved to New York City, where he studied film and dramatic writing at New York University. Known for his funny, realistic novels for children and young adults, Korman has also collaborated with his mother on two books of poetry written by the fictional character Jeremy Bloom. Never short for ideas, Korman is grateful to the real kids he meets for inspiration: "The best place to get ideas is at the schools I visit. No matter how inventive we writers try to be, the real characters are always the best ones." Gordon Korman lives in Great Neck, New York, with his wife and son.
Bailee Carter

Answers.com - How many books has lurlene mcdaniel wrote - 0 views

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    • Bailee Carter
      Bailee Carter on 25 Apr 11
       
      i read breathless it was amazing! you need to read it if you like sad but good books.
MyrandaK (((:

Meg Cabot Biography - life, children, parents, name, story, death, school, mother, young - 1 views

www.notablebiographies.com/...Cabot-Meg.html

biography meg cabot

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    • Shelby Tomlinson
      Shelby Tomlinson on 25 Apr 11
       
      There is lots of info on Meg Cabot. I don't have enough time to read ALL of it!!
  • February 1, 1967 • Bloomington, Indiana Author
  • Meg Cabot was born on February 1, 1967, in Bloomington, Indiana. She was an avid reader from a very early age, at first gobbling up comic books and science fiction at the local library.
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  • At one point, Cabot, who began publishing in 1998, was pumping out a novel almost every month; by early 2006 she had published forty-four works of fiction.
  • At one point, Cabot, who began publishing in 1998, was pumping out a novel almost every month; by early 2006 she had published forty-four works of fiction.
  • In 2000, however, Cabot hit the jackpot when she penned The Princess Diaries, a young adult novel that quickly caught on with readers primarily because the wryly humorous author was able to accurately capture "teen-speak." In 2001, The Princess Diaries was adapted for the big screen by Disney and its popularity catapulted Cabot from writer to celebrity.
  • In 2004, the movie The Princess Diaries 2 was released, which further followed the escapades of Mia, the Princess of Genovia. A few months prior, Cabot signed a seven-figure deal with her publisher, HarperCollins, to continue writing the Princess series and to build on her other young adult series. As Cabot told Teenreads.com, "I hope to write about [Mia] as long as people want to keep reading about her."
  • s of fiction
  • While cooling off in the library, Cabot soon discovered classic literature, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, by southern writer Harper Lee (1926–), and Jane Eyre, written by English novelist Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855). Jane Eyre, the story of the romance between a man and his daughter's nanny, in particular, had a lasting effect on young Cabot. As she explained in a 2004 interview with Christina Nunez, "It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have never left."
  • In addition to reading, Cabot was also obsessed with princesses.
  • "I was a traditional Disney-princess worshipper," she told Trudy Wyss of Borders. "You know, I had the Snow White birthday cake when I was six, drew Cinderella endlessly on my notepads." Cabot read about princesses (her favorite fairy tale is Beauty and the Beast ) and fantasized about being a real-life princess, often telling her mom and dad that her "real" parents, the king and queen, would arrive one day in Indiana to find her.
  • "It's one thing to be
  • "I am living proof that it is possible to profit from being a high school freak."
  • princess of a kingdom; it is quite another to be princess of an entire planet!"
  • While in high school Cabot began to write her own stories because, as she claimed in an Onion Street online interview, there was absolutely nothing else to do.
  • In addition, Cabot wrote for the high school newspaper and kept detailed journals. She also was active in after-school activities, including choir, theater, and the art club.
  • Although she enjoyed writing Cabot never planned on becoming a professional author. Instead, she dreamed of being an actress or a veterinarian.
  • Unfortunately, she flunked algebra and did rather poorly on the math portion of her SATs.
  • Following graduation from high school, Cabot decided to study art at the University of Indiana, where she could attend tuition-free since her father was a professor.
  • In 1991, with a bachelor of fine arts degree in hand, the budding artist moved to New York City to pursue a career as an illustrator. Instead, she landed a job as a freshman dormitory assistant manager at New York University. It was not exactly her dream job, but there were periods when work was slow, which gave her plenty of free time to return to her early love: writing.
  • Seven years and thousands of rejection letters later (Cabot claims she has a mail bag full of rejections), her first novel was finally published. It was an historical romance called Where Roses Grow Wild (1998), and it was written under the pen name, or alias, of Patricia Cabot. Several more romances followed in 1999 and 2000. At the same time, Cabot was busy trying her hand at a novel, called The Princess Diaries, that was aimed at younger readers. Even though she was a published author, Cabot's young adult novel was rejected seventeen times before it was finally purchased by HarperCollins and released in 2000.
  • The inspiration for Princess came from an event that happened in Cabot's own life. After her father died her mother began dating her daughter's former art teacher. Cabot was so horrified that she began keeping a diary. She expanded the diary entries into a story about a ninth-grader named Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo, also known as Mia, whose mother is dating her algebra teacher. Cabot also visited her old high school diaries to add a true teen voice to her character, a gangly, shy freshman being raised by her single mom in a Greenwich Village loft in New York City.
  • n addition to facing the trials and tribulations of teenage life, Mia's world is turned upside-down when she discovers that her father is actually the prince of a tiny European country called Genovia and that she is next in l
  • Critics gave mixed reviews to the The Princess Diaries, claiming that at times it was over the top and cartoonish.
  • "The reason girls are drawn to the book is an element of naughtiness—ooh, I'm reading something that's not supposed to be read."
  • A few reviewers, however, were troubled by some of the questionable situations that appear in the book. For example, Mia's parents were never married, and her mother has a boyfriend who sleeps over. In her All About Romance interview, Cabot speaks to the objection by saying The Princess Diaries is timely. "It really does reflect modern-day popular culture, as well as modern-day teen problems and concerns. Many librarians (and parents, as well as teachers) have pointed to those scenes in particular as examples of timely issues, considering how many kids now have single parents or have friends with single parents."
  • Regardless of the critics, readers were drawn to the book in huge groups.
  • In just a few short years The Princess Diaries had become a mini-dynasty with Meg Cabot as its queen
  • The Princess Diaries movies may not have been quite as successful if eighteen-year-old newcomer Anne Hathaway had not been chosen to play Mia Thermopolis, the nerdy American who is transformed into European royalty. In fact, even critics who panned the film consistently praised the fresh-faced, fledgling actress. As David DiCerto of the Catholic News Service wrote, "The mediocre material is elevated somewhat by the buoyant and beautiful Hathaway, whose sunny smile could light up a small kingdom of two."
  • nne Hathaway was born on November 12, 1982, in Brooklyn, New York, the middle child and only daughter of Gerald Hathaway, an attorney, and Kate McCauley, a singer and actress.
Leslie Blankenship

Amazon.com: Lurlene McDaniel: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...B000AP7LGG

lurlene mcdaniel cjhs

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