Children’s writer found a home in N.M. later in life
NEW YORK — Gary Paulsen, the acclaimed and prolific children’s author who often drew upon his rural affinities and wide-ranging adventures for tales that included Hatchet, Brian’s Winter and Dogsong, has died at age 82.
Random House Children’s Books announced Paulsen died suddenly Wednesday but did not immediately provide further details. Literary agent Jennifer Flannery told the Associated Press he died at his home in New Mexico, where he lived with his third wife, Ruth Wright Paulsen, an artist who illustrated some of his work.
Author of more than 100 books, with sales topping 35 million, Paulsen was a three-time finalist for the John Newbery Medal for the year’s best children’s book and recipient in 1997 of the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement.
He was a Minnesota native who deeply identified with the outdoors, whether sailing on the Pacific Ocean, hiking in New Mexico or braving the cold of the Alaskan dogsled race, the Iditarod. For a time he lived in a cabin in rural Minnesota, where he finished his first novel, The Special War, and on a houseboat in the Pacific Ocean. He spent his latter years on a remote ranch in New Mexico, a bearded outdoorsman sometimes likened to Ernest Hemingway.
“I can’t live in towns anymore,” he told the New York Times in 2006. “The last time I was up in Santa Fe, I wasn’t there 20 minutes before I brewed up, almost slugged a tourist on the steps of my wife’s gallery.”
Paulsen received the Newbery Honor prize for Hatchet,
The Winter Room and Dogsong, about a young native Alaskan in search of a simpler past and the old ways. He also wrote hundreds of articles, poetry, historical fiction and such nonfiction works as the memoir
Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood, which came out earlier this year. His final novel, Northwind, will be published in January by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Younger Readers.
Many readers knew him best for his Hatchet novels, beginning with the eponymous 1986 release, in which 13-year-old Brian Robeson survives a plane crash and lives for weeks in the wilderness, relying in part on the hatchet his mother had given him. In an introduction for the book’s 30th anniversary edition, Paulsen wrote that the novel “came from the darkest part” of his childhood, when books and the woods were his escapes from the pain of his parents’ miserable marriage and his own social isolation.
“On my own, under the trees or on the lake or next to the river, I was protected and as far from danger as I’d ever been,” he wrote. “In the wilderness, I was at ease. I learned the rules and I not only survived, I thrived. The woods and books are the only reason I got through my childhood in one piece.”
The Hatchet series continued with The River, Brian’s Winter — in which Paulsen imagined an alternate ending for the first novel — Brian’s Return and Brian’s Hunt. He also turned out such series as the Francis Tucket adventure books and Murphy Westerns.