| Author Corner Home | MAE Award Home | Reading Corner Home |
| Blume | Cormier | Crutcher | Duncan |Garden | Hinton | Kerr | L'Engle | Lipsyte | McCaffrey | Myers | Paulsen | Peck | Voigt | Zindel |
Richard
Peck
Richard
Peck
 His
Books |
Other
Information |
Other
Web Sites |
 |
In 1990, Richard Peck received the MAE Award. The
committee recognized his young adult novels: Are You in the House Alone?,
Father
Figure, The Ghost Belonged to Me, Ghosts I Have Been,
Secrets
of the Shopping Mall, and Remembering the Good Times.
Peck became familiar with contemporary adolescent problems while teaching high school in Illinois. He liked his students, but after several years, he became discouraged and quit. He decided to write books for teenagers that featured the problems he had seen. “Ironically, it was my students who taught me to be a writer, though I had been hired to teach them,” he said in a speech published in Arkansas Libraries. |
| “They taught me that a novel must entertain first before it can be
anything else. I learned that there is no such thing as a ‘grade reading
level’; a young person’s ‘reading level’ and attention span will rise and
fall according to his degree of interest. I learned that if you do
not have a happy ending for the young, you had better do some fast talking.”
He observed that young adults want approval from their peers, and they seek reassurance from their reading material. Peck believes that in a young adult novel, “the reader meets a worthy young character who takes one step nearer maturity, and he or she takes that step independently.” In 2001, Peck won the Newbery Award for A Year Down Yonder. |