Richard Peck was born on April 5, 1934, in Decatur, Illinois, to a mother who was a college graduate and a father who had left school by the seventh grade to work. Although he was born during the Depression, the shortages that later came with World War II, as well as his family's creative responses to them, had a far more lasting effect on Peck. Storytelling was a gift from both parents: Richard's mother, Virginia, read to him when he was a child, and his father's stories of a rural past spent hunting and fishing in and along the Sangamon River attracted Peck in the same manner that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn did later. The time-honored stories of the truckers and newspaperboys who frequented Peck's family gas station held a similar appeal.

Peck's public school teachers were demanding; discipline almost seemed patriotic during the war. After...