About The Author
LOUIS SACHAR
Louis Sachar (pronounced Sacker) was born in 1954 in East Meadow, New York, moved to Southern California in his youth, and now lives in Austin, Texas.
Sachar briefly attended Antioch College in Ohio and eventually graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976. He is a law school graduate who has passed the bar exam, but he chose a writing profession over a legal one.
His first book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, was published just as he began law school. His interest in children’s literature reportedly began when he became a teachers’ aide in an elementary school while he was in college. Not only did he earn three credits for helping out at the school, but the work became his favorite and perhaps most important college course.
But Sachar also began to write because he enjoyed reading. The authors he most enjoyed became his heroes, and he wanted to be like them. Today he especially enjoys Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, J. D. Salinger, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Sachar reportedly writes alone and doesn’t talk about a book until it is finished. Usually he begins with just a kernel of inspiration and over time develops it into a good story. He admits that he frequently suffers from writer’s block.
Sachar believes that his initial inspiration for Holes probably came from the long, hot summers he has spent in Texas. Writing Holes, which Sachar considers his “best” book, took a year and a half. The book has been published in many other countries.
Holes has won numerous awards, among them the prestigious Newberry Award, the National Book Award, the New York Times Book Review Notable Children’s Book of the Year, the ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and the Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.
Some of Sachar’s other works are Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Johnny’s in the Basement, Someday Angeline, Sixth Grade Secrets, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, The Boy Who Lost His Face, Wayside School is Falling Down, Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes, the Marvin Redpost series (Marvin Redpost: Kidnapped at Birth?, Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?, and Marvin Redpost: Why Pick on Me?), Alone in His Teacher’s House, Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, and Small Steps.
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