If “Northwind” feels like a return to the core of Paulsen’s craft, “Gone to Woods,” which came out a year ago, read like a summation of his life and what he has learned. Still, he wrote in 30th anniversary edition of the book, it came from “the darkest part of my childhood,” and when his character refuses to leave the fire he built behind, you suspect it’s more out of rare comfort than pragmatic survival. He had three honors from the Newbery awards for children’s literature, for “Dogsong” (1985), “The Winter Room” (1989) and “Hatchet” (1986), his beloved classic, about the young survivor of a plane crash in the Yukon who learns to navigate the woods with only a hatchet. Last month I wrote a brief, year-end eulogy: His greatest hits are unmissable. To be honest, read enough of him, some stories blur together. That’s a footnote in the life of Gary Paulsen. ![]() “Once, in the middle of the night in bad weather where the Columbia River comes slashing out to the sea, I had been caught up in dodging half-sunken logs pushed out of the river into open water - many boats have been sunk by them over the years - and I accidentally moved between what I found to be a large male orca and his family pod.” In an author’s note, Paulsen describes this setting as a “mythical frontier, inspired by the North American coast I traveled as well as the Norwegian coast of my ancestors.” Though it reads quite close to a fable or ancient Nordic legend, Paulsen then mentions that, oh, most of what happens to the boy in this, it also happened to him. It is about a Nordic boy who escapes a cholera outbreak in a wooden canoe, setting off for the Pacific Northwest. “Northwind” reads in an elemental, back-to-basics register. But he finished one last book, which plays like the culminating words of a life stuffed with incident. He died of cardiac arrest last fall at his home in New Mexico. He left and faced down nature, then as an adult, he sought out adventure. Indeed, he before he left Chicago, he had lived a childhood so harsh and cruel, Dickens would have paused. The children he wrote about were like himself, forced to grow up quickly. He wrote more than 200 books, for young adults, and grown-ups, though that line was fuzzy. He was so prolific that sometimes it seemed we would reading something new by Gary Paulson indefinitely. He wrote many, many adventure tales, most of which were culled from the details of his own life. Read enough of Gary Paulsen and you’ll think: Well, of course he did that, too. You’ve only dreamed of leaving home to join the circus. He also made cheese, and was a writer for the original TV series of “Mission: Impossible.” As an adult, he lived in the Minnesota woods for nearly 20 years, deeply impoverished. ![]() He was an animal trapper, and sometimes a farmworker. Paulsen was a soldier, a truck driver, a paperboy, an actor, an alcoholic (sober for the last 50 years of his life). After all, he once told NPR that Jack London - whose “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” were obvious forerunners to Paulsen’s work - was a great writer but he “didn’t know what he was talking about.” London had a modest childhood, though compared with what Paulsen lived, none of us know what we’re talking about. ![]() He was often compared with Ernest Hemingway, who was also fond of the wilderness, wrote brisk sentences full of violence, and wore a white beard and weathered face but Chicago can’t claim two Hemingways, and I suspect Paulsen would have found Papa Hemingway kind of soft. Sometimes literally, certainly spiritually, he rarely left. This guy escaped into the Minnesota woods along the Canadian border and flourished. Paulsen grew up in Chicago, then crafted meaning out of hopelessness. You just want to stay in and read stories about people who made calm out of chaos, and here you go. A lake so slate and overcast you don’t know where the sky begins. January in Chicago, February in Chicago, mud season, ice season, the doldrums of another pandemic winter, the settling depression of a fresh chance at normality already slipping away. Either way, your children will know him, and their children will know him. His books sold more than 35 million copies, and if you came of age in the past four decades and had a thing for survival stories, chances are good you read him. It’s a shame that you don’t know Gary Paulsen, that his name was never as recognizable as a Beverly Cleary (“Ramona the Pest”) or an Eric Carle (“The Very Hungry Caterpillar”), all of whom wrote books for children and all of whom died last year.Īt least, I’m assuming you’ve never heard of Gary Paulsen.
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