About The Author
PAUL ZINDEL(1936- )
Paul Zindel is an author who understands and enjoys his audience. Not only does he say in interviews that he likes teenagers and feels a special proclivity for them and their lives, but again and again his voice speaks out for teenagers in his books. He has a sense of fun and authenticity about him that young people seem almost universally to respond favorably to.
Zindel was born on Staten Island in New York City in 1936. About the time that he was two years old, his father left the family. Zindel was raised by a single mother. The fact that they were forced to move a great deal during his childhood may have deprived him of some of the close relationships that children often form. But having so many experiences so young apparently provided him with a storehouse of knowledge gained by observing situations and people along the way. According to Zindel himself,all of his books started with some experience in his own life.
After attending public elementary school in New York, he went on to Port Richmond High School in the same city. It was there that he published his first story collaboratively with a schoolmate. “A Geometric Nightmare” was, not surprisingly, a story that describes a geometry teacher who frightened Zindel and the other student.
Zindel graduated from Wagner College and became a high school chemistry teacher. He taught for ten years before his play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds was produced in 1965. At that point he began to dedicate full time to his writing.
Zindel currently lives in Manhattan. He is married and the father of two post-teenage children.
Some of Zindel’s most noteworthy works, in addition to Gamma Rays, for which he won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize and the New York Critics Circle Award, are The Pigman (1968), My Darling, My Hamburger (1969), I Never Loved Your Mind (1970), Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball (1976), Confessions of a Teenage Baboon (1977), The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas (1978), The Pigman’s Legacy (1980), Harry and Hortense at Hormone High (1984), and The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman (1987), A Begonia for Miss Applebaum (1989), The Pigman and Me (1992), Attack of the Killer Fishsticks (1993), Fifth Grade Safari (1993), Fright Party (1993), One Hundred Percent Laugh Riot (1994), The Doom Stone (1995), Raptor (1998), Reef of Death (1998), Rats (1999), The Gadget (2001), Night of the Bat (2001), The Scream Museum (2001), The Surfing Corpse (2001), The E-Mail Murders (2001), The Lethal Gorilla (2001), The Square Root of Murder (2002), Death on the Amazon (2002), The Gourmet Zombie (2002), The Phantom of 86th Street (2002), The Houdini Whodunit (2002), Death by CD (2003), The Petrified Parrot (2003), Camp Megadeath (2003)
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