Robert Newton Peck's first book, A Day No Pigs Would Die, won several book awards and secured its author a long career in young-adult fiction. This 1972 debut and Peck's subsequent works portray a rural America in which hard work, self-sufficiency, and...

"I am tall, and awkward, and [a] stubborn Vermonter who wears mule-ear boots, a ten-gallon hat and what I like to think of as a country-boy grin. "My favorite sport is curling; I play piano honky-tonk style; I'm a rotten dancer and I'm allergic to...

Robert Peck (born 1928) won critical and popular acclaim for his first novel, A Day No Pigs Would Die (1973). Critics lauded its unsentimental rendering of farm life and the often brutal realities of the natural world, and the book is now a frequently...

Since 1991, Podell Productions has produced some 34 videos, ranging in length from 18-26 minutes, which have profiled well known American and British authors such as Jerry Spinelli, Robert Cormier and Lynne Reid Banks. In 1998, the videos focused on Zilpha Keatley Snyder,...

PECK, Robert Newton. Weeds in bloom; autobiography of an ordinary man. Random House, Laurel Leaf. 209p. illus, c2005. 978-9-275-82802-7. $6.50. JS Contrary to the title, Robert Newton Peck is no ordinary man. His autobiography provides fascinating glimpses into the life of an...

Robert Newton Peck's early books brought an understanding of the realities of rural life to many youngsters. His characterization was sharp and his themes of pride and strength well presented; he also maintained a sense of American traditions. His greatest appeal as an author has been with the young adult audience…. [If Robert Peck] hopes to establish himself firmly in the field of children's literature, he needs to develop carefully worthwhile fiction that will have a lasting appeal. K...

["Wild Cat" is] is a deliberate backlash to the cloying sweetness of most cat books. [It is a] harsh, brutal, detailed moralistic naturalistic [story of a miserable urban cat's life cycle]…. The saga of "Wild Cat" begins in the womb and birth canal of a mother cat who is wedged in an alley somewhere, and moves briskly from one trauma (trucks, siblings being eaten, crunch, crunch, by dogs) to another (sex, rats, loss of mate, plunge into river, birth)…. The te...

Designed to stimulate interest in animal life in one small meadow, the author [of Path of Hunters: Animal Struggle in a Meadow] has described a considerable number of life cycles to be observed from one spring to the next…. At the time that their activities are being recorded, they are all involved in some aspect of their life cycle: mating, birth, survival, death. Details are explicit and often poetic as mates are found, homes are built, and the young are born. The struggle is continuous, the hunt f...