Richard Peck, noted author for young readers, dies at 84
Richard Peck, a former English teacher whose award-winning novels for young readers used historical fiction, horror and other genres to tell stories about rape, unwanted pregnancy and suicide, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 84.
His sister, Cheryl Peck, said the cause was kidney failure. He had received a diagnosis of bladder cancer.
“I’m a writer because I never had a teacher who said, ‘Write what you know,’” Peck said in a speech to the Library of Congress Book Festival in 2013. “If I’d been limited to writing what I know, I would have produced one unpublishable haiku.”
He added: “Beatrix Potter was never a rabbit. J.K. Rowling did not attend Hogwarts School.”
Yet Peck’s final novel, “The Best Man” (2016), echoed his personal life more than most of his books.
A coming-of age story about a young boy, it deals in part with the same-sex marriage of his uncle and his teacher.
Around the time of its publication, the intensely private Peck publicly came out as gay. Until then, his sister said, “If you wanted to know Richard Peck, you could find him in his novels and in his messages about growing up responsibly.”
During an interview to promote that book with Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, a journal of children’s and young adult books, Peck reflected on the advances that gay rights had made in his lifetime.
“Now, in the 21st century, something wonderful has happened,” he said. “It’s also a history lesson, and that is: History doesn’t move at a steady pace. One day you wake up and the world is in a different place.”
Still, Peck was reminded of a less tolerant past in March when an administrator at Athens Academy, a private school in Georgia, acted on a parent’s complaint to remove “The Best Man” from a book-fair display of books for children ages 3-9 that had been nominated for awards. Rather than move the book out of the sight of children, Avid Bookshop, which ran the fair, shut the event down, uncomfortable with the school’s attempted censorship.
Peck responded on Facebook, writing that Avid’s action proved that “an attack upon one book is an attack upon all” and that “an independent bookstore has all sorts of supple strength that the frightened school and the vast and unlocal chain bookstores don’t have.”
John Thorsen, the head of school, apologized in a message posted on its website, calling the incident a “deeply regrettable set of circumstances that is not consistent with our welcoming, safe and inclusive environment.”