The Cruise of the Arctic Star, published in 1973, reflects his love of the sea and the land, as well as California history; an autobiographical book, it is an account of a voyage up the California and Oregon coasts. O'Dell attended Occidental College in 1919, the University of Wisconsin in 1920, Stanford University in 1920-1921, and the University of Rome in 1925, but he did not take a degree. A motion-picture cameraman and a book editor for a Los Angeles newspaper, O'Dell became a full-time writer in 1934, and between then and 1967 he wrote three novels for adults:
Woman of Spain: A Story of Old California (1934),
Hill of the Hawk (1947), and
The Sea is Red: A Novel (1958). During the same period, he wrote two nonfiction books for adults. It was not until the late fifties that he began writing for children.
In 1981, O'Dell established the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, an annual award of $5,000 for a book of historical fiction set in the New World and written in English by a citizen of the United States.
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