Chris Crutcher is one of the most honored young adult novelists, having won the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Young Adult Services Library Association, an award from the Assembly on Adolescent Literature for significant contributions to young adult literature, and the Intellectual Freedom Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Pretty amazing for a self-professed academic underachiever who often tells the story of how he read only one book—To Kill a Mockingbird—cover-to-cover during four years of high school.

Crutcher was born on July 17, 1946, in Dayton, Ohio; he is a middle child. He says that they all arrived in Cascade, Idaho, a small lumber and logging town of less than 1,000 people, while he was still an infant.

His father, John, had been a B-17 pilot in World War II. Crutcher described his father as...