[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...
"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...
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,...
Robert Edmund Cormier (January 19, 1925 – November 2, 2000) was an American author for young adults. He lived in Leominster, Massachusetts, USA. He grew up and married there and he raised four children (three daughters and a son). Cormier was a...
ONE OF the most controversial of children's writers, Robert Cormier took the traditional school or adventure story into an atmosphere of depression, failure and moral nihilism, common enough in some 20th-century adult writing but hitherto unknown in teenage fiction. Much banned in parts of...
Young adult literature has lost its grand master. On November 2, 2000, Robert Cormier died in Boston after a brief illness. He was seventy-five years old, but his thirteen YA novels speak to the hearts of teens everywhere and will continue to do so...
Not all penguin stories are equal in the public's mind."And Tango Makes Three," an award-winning children's book based on a true story about two male penguins who raised a baby penguin, topped the American Library Association's annual list of works attracting the most complaints from...
Robert Cormier is a conspicuous oddity in his chosen field. Writing for the adolescent reader, he has departed from standard models and broken some of the most fundamental taboos of that vocation. Each of his hard-edged novels for the young goes considerably beyond the standard limits of "contemporary realism" to describe a world of painful harshness, where choices are few and consequences desperate. Moreover, his novels are unequivocally downbeat; [The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese and After...
Novels for young adults that deal with social issues of one sort or another have been around for quite awhile now. In fact, social relevance seems to be a primary feature of the genre, the attempt to catch the reader by surprise with unconventional characters and situations as much a part of the books' basic ingredients as the adolescent hero himself. Many of these novels, however, stop short of fully exploring the issues they introduce. It is enough, the sentiment seems to be, that the subjects are ...
Recently we have seen a trend in literature for young people that some call realism, but in fact it is not realistic at all. Realism is an honest attempt to picture people and events as they really are. To portray things from the brutal or dark side only, as is being done in current literature, is no more realistic than presenting only those sweet and idealistic stories of an earlier age. As an example, The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, is described as a realistic junior novel, and it meets some of the ...
