Paul Zindel

Paul Zindel is an author whose work strums with resonance for readers no matter how bizarre his plots get.

Born in 1936 in New York, Zindel had a lonely childhood. His father left the family when he was two and his family subsequently moved 15 times. In his autobiography, Zindel writes that 853 horrifying things happened to him by the time he was a teenager. Unlike most writers, Zindel did not like to read as a child, preferring to make his own stories with puppets in cardboard boxes. Later in life, he said he wrote for people who did not like to read.

He managed to escape adolescence and went to Wagner College where he earned chemistry degrees. During his undergraduate years he took a creative writing class with playwright Edward Albee. After that he worked as a high school chemistry teacher for ten years.

When he first turned his hand to professional writing, it was to pen a play that would win him the Pulitzer Prize. It would be adapted to a movie directed by Paul Newman and starring Joanne Woodward.

His play impressed many people, including Editor Charlotte Zolotow who encouraged him to try novel writing. In 1968, Zindel wrote The Pigman. It is one of several novels that are considered the launch of the young adult genre.

He continued to write, producing young adult novels, plays, children's books, and screenplays (including Up the Sandbox with Barbara Streisand and Mame with Lucille Ball). Into each book he infused the themes that haunted him throughout his lifetime, whether in his childhood or in the lives of his wife and children. Zindel and his wife, novelist Bonnie Hildebrand, divorced after 25 years of marriage.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Zindel won an ALAN Award for Contributions to Young Adult Literature and the Margaret Edwards Award for lifetime achievement.

During the last three years of his life, he launched a new series, publishing four to five books per year.

Zindel died in 2003 of cancer.

Bibliography

Freaky Facts Club	Others:
Attack of the Killer Fishfingers	The Pigman
Fright Party!	My Darling, My Hamburger
City Safari	I Never Loved Your Mind
The 100% Laugh Riot	Mrs. Beneker
	Up to the Sandbox
P.C. Hawke	I Love My Mother
The Scream Museum	Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball
The Surfing Corpse	Confessions of a Teenage Baboon
The E-Mail Murders	The Undertaker's Gone Bananas
The Lethal Gorilla	A Star for the Latecomer (with Bonnie Zindel)
The Square Root of Murder	The Pigman's Legacy
Death on the Amazon	The Girl Who Wanted a Boy
The Gourmet Zombie	To Take a Dare (with Crescent Dragonwagon)
The Phantom of 86 th Street	Compromising Positions
The Houdini Whodunit	When a Darkness Falls
Death by CD	Harry and Hortense at Hormone High
The Petrified Parrot	The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman
Camp Megadeath	A Begonia for Mrs. Applebaum
	Attack of the Killer Fishsticks
Plays:	David and Della
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds	Fifth Grade Safari
Let Me Hear You Whisper	Loch
And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little	The Doom Stone
The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild	Reef of Death
Every 17 Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy	Raptor
Ladies at the Alamo	Rats
The Ladies Should Be in Bed	Bats
Amulets Against the Dragon Forces	The Gadget
	Night of the Ba
Non-fiction
The Pigman and Me