himself rather than the boy Elliott as the central narrative consciousness. The combination of an almost childlike innocence linked to a kind of ancient, archetypal source of wisdom is characteristic of a writer who has ranged from lyric expressions of the mysterious wonders of a child's mind in many books for young readers to riveting explorations of the nature of Evil in books tracing the phenomenon of Nazism through the twentieth century. Kotzwinkle has written effectively in a variety of genres and forms so disparate that neither a critical consensus nor a specific audience for his work has taken shape in spite of his accomplishments.
Kotzwinkle was born on 22 November 1938 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the only child of William John Kotzwinkle, a printing-department manager, and Madolyn Murphy Kotzwinkle, a housewife. In describing the beginnings of his awareness of himself as a writer, Kotzwinkle recalls his father on a hike pointing to the Lackawanna Valley as if presenting the richness of the world to him and his mother taking him to a wading pool where a tadpole in his hand seemed, he said, like an "exquisite jewel." "I became a writer that moment in the valley," Kotzwinkle claims, but he did not actually begin the practice of writing (aside from a poem he wrote at age eight and can still quote) until he found himself "writing poetry from nowhere at college" partly because he found that at Penn State, which he attended after beginning a program in journalism at Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, the designation "poet" made him more interesting to some women in his classes.
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