The Authors and Illustrators - Profiles

Jack Gantos

  Jack Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. He remembers a lot of "pass the chalk" in Mrs. Neiderheizer's first grade. He was in the Bluebird reading group, which he later found out was for the slow readers. To this day he'd rather be called a Bluebird than a slow reader. His favorite game at that time was pretending that his clothes were on fire and rolling down a hill to save himself.
  When he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British school, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing. Students were friendly but fiercely competitive, and the teachers made learning a lot of fun. By fifth grade, he had managed to learn 90 percent of what he knows to this very day.
  When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Jack retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. His greatest wish in life is to replace trailer parks, which he thinks will eliminate most of the targets for tornadoes and educate an entire generation of great kids who now go to schools that are underfunded and substandard.
  The seeds for Jack's writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister's diary and decided that he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers' lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories.
  In junior high he went to a school that had been converted from a former state prison. He thinks that the inmates probably fled for their lives once the students showed up. Again, he spent most of his time reading on his own.
  In high school he decided to become a writer. But he would have to wait another three years, until he went to college, before he could actually meet other writers and study with teachers who thought writing amounted to more than just composing diary entries and good birthday cards.
  While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success, and marked the beginning of Jack's career as a professional writer. This surprised a great many people who thought he was going to be a mechanic specializing in rehabilitating old bookmobiles.
  Jack continued to write children's books and began to teach courses in children's book writing and children's literature. He developed the master's degree program in children's book writing at Emerson College, and is now teaching in the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children's book writers.
  His publications can take a reader from "cradle to grave" - from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults.

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