Gary paulsen biography author nora

He also refers to himself, in this book, in the third person and only as "the boy". Much of Paulsen's work features the outdoors and highlights the importance of nature. He often uses "coming of age" themes in his novels, where a character masters the art of survival in isolation as a rite of passage to manhood and maturity. He was critical of technology.

Other well known works include Dogsong and The Winter Room Paulsen had two children from his first marriage, Lynn and Lance, and a son Jim from his third marriage with Ruth Wright. Although a successful author, Paulsen said he chose to live modestly. He also spent time living on a houseboat on the Pacific Ocean. InPaulsen entered the 1,mile 1, km Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Raceand placed 41st out of 54 finishers, with an official time of 17 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes, and 38 seconds.

Insuffering from heart disease, Paulsen decided to give up dog sledding, which he described as the most difficult decision he had ever made. Paulsen would spend more than a decade sailing the Pacific before getting back into dog sledding in According to his keynote speech on October 13,at the Sinclair Lewis writing conference in Sauk Centre, Minnesotahe still intended to compete in the Iditarod.

I drank and drank. After just barely graduating from high school in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, inPaulsen 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. Army, serving from toand 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. Serdahely in Writer's Digest. And I thought: 'What the hell, I am an engineering writer. 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 HollywoodCalifornia.

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. It probably did more to improve my craft and ability than any other single event in my life. Paulsen's first book, The Special War, was published inand 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.

On a bet with a friend, he once wrote eleven articles and short stories inside four days and sold all of them. His prolific output was interrupted by a libel lawsuit brought against his 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. 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. There was no one around, and all I could hear was the rhythm of the dogs' breathing as they pulled the sled. 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. He went so far as to enter the grueling twelve-hundred-mile Iditarod race in Alaskaan experience that later provided the basis for his award-winning novel Dogsong. Paulsen's acclaimed young adult fiction — all written since the s — often centers around teenage characters who arrive at an understanding of themselves and their world through pivotal experiences with nature.

His writing has been praised for its almost poetic effect, and he is also credited with creating vivid descriptions of his characters' emotional states. His novel, Tracker, tells about a thirteen-year-old boy who faces his first season of deer hunting alone while his grandfather is bedridden, dying of cancer. Ronald A. Jobe praised the novel in Language Arts as "powerfully written," adding that Paulsen "explores with the reader the innermost frustrations, hurts, and fears of the young boy.

Dogsong, a Newbery Medal honor book, is a rite-of-passage novel about a young Inuit boy named Russel who wishes to abandon the increasingly modern ways of his people. Through the guidance of a tribal elder, Russel learns to bow-hunt and dogsled, and eventually leads his own pack of dogs on a trip across Alaska and back. Paulsen's 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. 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. 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. 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. Joe games. 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 inat 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 gary paulsen biography author nora. In Mr. Tucket fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket has a number of hair-raising adventures when he is captured by the Pawnee gary paulsen biography author nora wandering away from his family's Oregon-bound wagon train.

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.

Gary paulsen biography author nora

School Library Journal, October,p. Wysocki, review of Soldier's Heart, p. Writers' Digest, January,F. Serdahely, "Prolific Paulsen," July,pp. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

ISBN New York: Random house. Gary Paulsen. The Quilt. New York: Random House. Archived from the original on December 22, Retrieved February 22, The Guardian. East Bay Times. Associated Press. March 31, Los Angeles Times. Soundings Online. Archived from the original on December 3, Associated Press News. January 13, Archived from the original on October 13, Retrieved October 14, External links [ edit ].

Works by Gary Paulsen. Authority control databases. Categories : births deaths 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American dog mushers American male novelists American writers of young adult literature Bemidji State University alumni Margaret A.

Hidden categories: Webarchive template wayback links Use mdy dates from October Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata. Toggle the table of contents. Paulsen in The story is told in the first person. It is a coming-of-age story about family and life in general. He lived for 82 years and lives on through his books.

Explore literature by Gary Paulsen below, created by the team at Book Analysis. About Gary PaulsenAmerican. Quick Facts. Nationality: American. Birth Year: Literary Period: Contemporary. Share Cite. He dropped out of Bemidji University and joined the U. Army where he served for roughly three years. Gary met his father for the first time at the age of 9.