Jack Gantos

Jack Gantos
Born (1951-07-02) July 2, 1951
Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania
Occupation writer
Nationality American
Alma mater Emerson College
Genre comics
Notable works Dead End in Norvelt,
Hole in My Life
Notable awards 2011 Newbery Medal

Jack Gantos (born July 2, 1951) is an American author of children's books. He is best known for the fictional characters Rotten Ralph and Joey Pigza. Rotten Ralph is a cat who stars in ten picture books written by Gantos, and illustrated by Nicole Rubel from 1976 to 2011. Joey Pigza is a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), featured in five novels from 1998 to 2014.

Gantos won the 2012 Newbery Medal from the American Library Association (ALA), recognizing Dead End in Norvelt as the previous year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children".[1] Dead End also won the 2012 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction[2] and made the Guardian Prize longlist in Britain.[3]

His 2002 memoir Hole in My Life was a runner up for the ALA Printz Award and Sibert Medal. Previously Gantos was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award[4] and a finalist for the Newbery Medal for two Joey Pigza books.

Biography

Jack Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh to construction superintendent John Gantos and banker Elizabeth (Weaver) Gantos. The seeds for Gantos's writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister's diary and decided he could write better than she could. Raised in South Florida and the Caribbean, he began collecting anecdotes in grade school, realizing that everyday stories were the basis of great literature. He was a good high school student, but he lost interest when his family moved. At first Gantos tried staying in Florida alone, but he kept messing up and was failing in school, so something had to change. He found a better opportunity to find things to write about when he followed his family out of the country. He decided to reinvent himself and followed his parents to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. However, he got caught up in the drug game there and through a series of events and bad decisions, including sailing a boat of hash for $10,000, Gantos ended up in jail. After serving one year out of a six-year sentence he entered college and continued writing, finally publishing his first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. The latest Rotten Ralph book was published in 2011; there are now 20 titles in the series for young readers. Gantos has written for readers of all ages, including the memoir "Hole in My Life," published in 2002.

Personal life

Jack Gantos received both his BFA and his MA from Emerson College in Boston.

During that time he began to work on picture books with Nicole Rubel, a student at the Boston Museum School. Rotten Ralph was the first to be published, by Houghton Mifflin in 1976. Within ten years Gantos and Rubel completed some twenty picture books including two more in the Rotten Ralph series.[5] Meanwhile, Gantos began teaching about writing children's books. He was professor of creative writing and literature (1978–95) and a visiting professor at Brown University (1986); University of New Mexico (1993); and Vermont College of Fine Arts (2004).[6] He developed master's degree programs in children's book writing at both Emerson College and Vermont College.

Awards and honors

Selected works

Picture books

Gantos is the author of dozens of published picture books including about twenty illustrated by Nicole Rubel. Rotten Ralph was the first published book for both creators and the first of about ten in the Rotten Ralph series as of 2012.[5]

Rotten Ralph series by Gantos and Rubel

Novels

Jack Henry series
  1. Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth Grade. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). 1 June 1994. ISBN 978-1-4299-7911-5. 
  2. Jack's New Power: Stories from a Caribbean Year (1995)
  3. Jack's Black Book. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). 1999. ISBN 978-1-4299-7811-8. 
  4. Jack on the Tracks: Four Seasons of Fifth Grade (1999)
  5. Jack Adrift: Fourth Grade Without a Clue (2003)
Joey Pigza series
  1. Joey Pigza Swallowed The Key (1998) ISBN 978-1-4299-3626-2
  2. Joey Pigza Loses Control. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). 2000. ISBN 978-0-374-70615-9. 
  3. What Would Joey Do? (2003)
  4. I Am Not Joey Pigza (2007)
  5. The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza (2014)
Other
  • Desire Lines (1997)
  • The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs (2006)
  • Dead End in Norvelt (2011) ISBN 978-1-4299-6250-6
  • From Norvelt to Nowhere (2013)

Notes

  1. 1 2 "Welcome to the Newbery Medal Home Page!". Association for Library Service to Children. Retrieved 2012-01-26.
  2. 1 2 Roger Sutton (17 January 2012). "2012 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction". The Horn Book. Retrieved 2012-10-27.
  3. 1 2 "Discover the Guardian children's fiction prize 2012 longlist - gallery". theguardian 8 June 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-27.
  4. 1 2 "National Book Awards – 1998". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-01-26.
  5. 1 2 3 (Nicole Rubel search report). Library of Congress Online Catalog. Retrieved 2012-10-27. Select "Rubel, Nicole" and Sort by "Date (oldest to youngest)".
  6. ↑ JRank Biography of Gantos
  7. ↑ "Jack Gantos to Receive 2014 Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature", Tulsa World, December 15, 2013.
  8. ↑ "Formats and Editions of Rotten Ralph". WorldCat. Retrieved 2012-10-27.

References

External links

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