[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...

In [The Bumblebee Flies Anyway], a story that is as trenchant as it is poignant, Cormier shows the courage and desperation of adolescents who know that their deaths are imminent. Barney, sixteen, is the only patient who is in the experimental hospital who is not in the group of the doomed but is there as a control: all of them are there voluntarily, some to contribute to research and some, like Mazzo, hoping for a quick death…. Barney thinks of a plan that will give Mazzo the quick, daring death he w...

With the grimmest of subjects Cormier has written his most affirmative novel [The Bumblebee Flies Anyway]…. The book has some serious flaws, notably in the depiction of Cassie, who we are told is "vibrant and compelling," but who remains an abstraction. But this is a fine novel, even better on rereading, with a startling poetry in the simplest phrases. Young adults will be caught up in the terrifying thriller, the scientific facts about memory, the controversial issue of medical ethics....

What's a person to say? He's done it again. Cormier is Cormier. [The Bumblebee Flies Anyway] is consistent with his other successes by focusing on the struggle between individuals and an institution. Institutions are dehumanizing, but humans do not succumb easily—or necessarily. While the larger theme is unchanged, he has forced us to think in yet another arena, for the battle we see here involves the medical establishment. Yet it would be a disservice to suggest that Bumblebee is an ex...