Children’s author best known for Frindle
Andrew Clements, a schoolteacher turned children’s author whose first novel, Frindle — about a mischievous fifth- grader who coins a new word for “pen” — was an unlikely bestseller about a kid’s power to shake up the classroom, if not the entire English language, died Nov. 28 at his home in West Baldwin, Maine. He was 70.
His wife, Rebecca Clements, confirmed his death and said the cause had not been determined.
Clements wrote more than 80 children’s books, including the text of picture books about a pampered Egyptian cat, an unbecoming fish, a Christmas in which Mrs. Claus stands in for Santa and a young girl who can’t stop using compound words such as nitwit, higgledy- piggledy and itty- bitty. That rib- tickling book was appropriately called Double Trouble in Walla Walla (1997).
Praised by author and New York Times reviewer A. J. Jacobs as “a genius of gentle, high-concept tales set in suburban middle schools,” Clements also wrote short novels such as The Landry News ( 1999), about an ambitious middle- school journalist, and The Losers Club ( 2017), which featured a bookish protagonist who mirrored a young Clements.
Clements was best known for Frindle (1996), which was rejected by four publishers before being acquired by Simon & Schuster. It sold 8.5- million copies worldwide, was translated into 15 languages and emerged out of a talk Clements gave at a Rhode Island elementary school in 1990, when he pointed to a dictionary and told the students that ordinary people had invented each of its words.
The third of six children, Andrew Elborn Clements was born in Camden, New Jersey, on May 29, 1949. His father was an insurance salesman, his mother a watercolour artist and homemaker.
While studying literature at Northwestern University, he wrote occasional poetry, including a piece that he reused in his youngadult novel Things Not Seen ( 2002), the first in a trilogy involving blindness and (literal) invisibility.
A professor who liked his writing invited him to teach creative writing at summer workshops and, after graduating in 1971, he received a master’s degree in teaching the next year from National Louis University in Chicago. He then taught at public schools in the city.
In addition to his wife of 46 years, survivors include his four sons.