[This entry was updated by Sylvia Patterson Iskander (University of Southwestern Louisiana) from her entry in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 34-51.] "Teen-agers' Laureate," the title conferred upon Robert Cormier by...
"Teen-agers' Laureate," the title conferred upon Robert Cormier by Tony Schwartz in Newsweek (16 July 1979), is fittingly bestowed upon this widely read and critically acclaimed author in the relatively new and somewhat amorphous genre referred to as you...
Robert Cormier began his life in the French-Canadian section of Leominster, Massachusetts on January 17, 1925. "We lived in a three-story tenement. I remember my mother and father heating up the water so we could take baths. I had a great childhood, surr...
A column by the staff of Freestyle LEXI MILLER, 17 I am the girl in the back of the room with a mind full of dreams and hopefulness. I am the one who diligently finishes tasks in the shadows of the assertive. I am...
I am Chicago. I am delirious. I used to be Jordan; won three championships. Then I was Pippen. Now I am Jordan again. Hear me roar. You are New York. You are miserable. You liked me as Pippen. I was...
The technique in I am the Cheese … is an exacting one, and to follow the tripartite narrative readers will have to be alert as well as concerned if they are to realise its full value. There is no mitigation of the terror or the peril of Adam Farmer, a boy of fourteen whose privacy is invaded and whose mind is almost destroyed by the secret, unassailable agencies of government…. Through hints, half-truths, the brutal insistence of Brint the questioner and the pathetic delusion of the boy, the a...
For [I am the Cheese] Robert Cormier has returned to the theme which dominated his outstanding earlier book, The Chocolate War: that of innocence and morality destroyed by the ruthless ambition of the masters of a corrupt society. In The Chocolate War, this society was a private school, and the victim a boy who alone stood out against corruption. Now, in I am the Cheese, Robert Cormier has extended this dark theme. The hero is an unwilling, uncomprehending and truly innocent victim of a greater, more hideou...
Cormier has written a novel of psychological suspense [in "I Am the Cheese"]. He is a fine technician and this is an absorbing, even a brilliant job. The book is assembled in mosaic fashion: a tiny chip here, a chip there, and suddenly the outline of a face dimly begins to take shape. Everything is related to something else; everything builds and builds to a fearsome climax. At the end the boy discovers that he is indeed the cheese—the bait around which the rats gather. Little can he do...
Discusses the three different perspectives of the story "I am the Cheese", by Robert Cormier. Describes how all three of our perspectives come together in the same moment of his narrow escape from his intended fate.
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