Zolotow had seen a local educational production of Zindel's play
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, which, when later modified and produced for Broadway, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1971. Realizing that Zindel possessed an accurate ear for incisive dialogue and an eye for honest, even if unusual, personal relationships, and knowing that these qualities were needed but lacking in fiction for teenagers, Zolotow convinced Zindel to write an adolescent novel. Zindel felt he knew the territory for he had spent ten years as a high school chemistry teacher. Just as important to his writing, though, are the facets of his own life which Zindel included not only in
The Pigman but in many of his later works as well: a virtually fatherless adolescence (the result of divorce); a turbulent relationship with a mother who was, Zindel later said in an interview, "a beautiful case of paranoia"; a feeling of worthlessness; and an absence of many longterm friendships, caused in part by his mother's insistence on changing residences every six months or so.
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