SOURCE CITATION
"Louis Sachar." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph © 2005 Perry Hagopian; photograph and biography provided by Random House.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Louis Sachar, the author of the popular "Wayside School" series of funny stories and winner of a National Book Award and the 1999 Newbery Medal for his novel Holes, was born in East Meadow, New York in 1954. He recalled in an interview for Something about the Author (SATA), "As a child, I remember having to keep away from the woods across the street, avoiding the older, tough kids who played there. (Looking back now, those tough kids were probably only eleven or twelve years old.) Younger kids, like me, weren't allowed in the woods, making them all the more forbidden."

At age nine, Sachar moved with his family to Tustin, California in Orange County, which, at the time, was mostly orange groves. "We cut through the orange groves on the way to school, and had orange fights on the way home. Now, sadly, most of the groves have been paved over and replaced with fast food restaurants, offices, and housing developments."

While attending Barnum Woods School in East Meadow, then Red Hill School in Tustin, "nothing especially traumatic" happened to Sachar. For the most part he enjoyed school, got good grades, liked math, and played in Little League. It wasn't until high school, in the late 1960s, that he began to love reading. This was during a typical teenage rebellious period. His high school had a dress code which he preferred to ignore, wearing his hair long despite reprimands and instructions to cut it off. "My parents fortunately were very understanding and gave me a lot of leeway during these difficult years," he once commented.

Following high school, Sachar had started college in Ohio at Antioch when he received news of his father's sudden death. "He died when I was eighteen--seventeen years ago--and I still haven't gotten over it."

Returning to California to be near his mother, Sachar took the next semester off. "For three months I worked as a Fuller Brush Man, and I was great at it. My employers couldn't understand how I could possibly want to go back to college when I had such a great career ahead of me selling brushes."

With other aspirations, Sachar returned to school, majoring in economics at Berkeley, where he also took creative writing classes. He continued to read a lot on his own, but didn't like English classes because he "didn't like analyzing the books to death."

Sachar once commented to SATA that he "developed a particular interest in Russian literature and somehow got the rather ridiculously ambitious notion to learn the language and read (his) favorite Russian authors in the original." "After taking over a year of Russian," he added, "I realized it was still Greek to me. A week into the semester I dropped out of Russian V and tried to figure out what other class I should take instead. As I wandered across the campus, I saw an elementary school girl handing out pieces of paper. I took one from her. It read: 'Help. We need teacher's aides at our school. Earn three units of credit.'

"Prior to that time I had no interest whatsoever in kids. However, I signed up to be a teacher's aide because I needed to take something other than Russian, and it sounded easy. It turned out to be not only my favorite class, but also the most important class I took during my college career. After I was there for a while they asked me to be the 'Noon Time Supervisor.' It was my job to watch over the kids during lunch, for which I was paid $2.04 a day. I played games with the kids who all called me 'Louis, the Yard Teacher.'

"Around that same time I came upon In Our Town by Damon Runyon, a book of very short stories, two or three pages each, about different characters in a town. This gave me the idea for Sideways Stories from Wayside School, which is a book of short stories about different kids in a school. All the kids are named after kids I knew at the school where I worked. 'Louis the Yard Teacher' is also a character in the book. I probably had more fun writing that book than any of my others, because it was just a hobby then, and I never truly expected to be published."

After graduating from Berkeley, Sachar took a job as shipping manager for a sweater factory in Connecticut, while writing Sideways Stories from Wayside School in the evenings. He was fired from the job after about seven months.

"Thinking it was time to return to school, I sent out the finished manuscript of Sideways Stories to ten publishers while simultaneously sending out law school applications. My first book was accepted for publication during my first week at University of California, beginning a six-year struggle over trying to decide between being an author or a lawyer," Sachar told SATA. After graduating from law school and passing the bar, Sachar wrote three more children's books while practicing law part-time when it "didn't interfere" with his writing. He wrote in the mornings and practiced law in the afternoons. "The hardest part was putting on a suit and tie at one o'clock in the afternoon and going to a deposition after a somewhat bohemian morning." He continued working in this manner through his next several books until he was established enough as an author to write full time.

The long-awaited sequel to Sideways Stories from Wayside School did not appear for several years. Sachar once recalled to SATA, "When I first received a letter from a kid inquiring about a sequel, I thought he was joking; the idea hadn't even crossed my mind. Though Sideways Stories wasn't highly successful when it first came out, I did receive a number of letters from students, calling it their favorite book. Several years later, after having difficulty finding a publisher for There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, I decided it was time to try a sequel set at Wayside.

"Interestingly enough, despite the troubles with There's a Boy, it has since become my most popular book." The story of Bradley Chalkers, a school-room outcast who is his own worst enemy, and Jeff Fishkin, the new kid who slowly befriends him, the book was completed in 1982 but did not find a publisher until 1985. "Editors kept telling me that I switched back and forth between Jeff and Bradley's points of view too often. I wanted to alternate viewpoints to fool the reader into thinking that they were reading Jeff's story, to lure them into Bradley's. The publishers, however, preferred that the book be written entirely from Bradley's point of view.

Published in 1987, There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom is "a funny book," wrote Betsy Hearne in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, "not in the flip way implied by the title, but in the slightly sad sense that touches all true comedy." In School Library Journal, David Gale commented that Bradley's eventual success in learning to like himself and make friends will "gratify readers."

Sachar said in SATA, "While working on this novel, I wrote for about two hours every morning and then every afternoon I made up a puzzle for the sequel to Sideways Stories entitled Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School. Having enjoyed math so much when I was in grade school, I wanted Sideways Arithmetic to help kids discover that math could be fun. Unfortunately, I think a lot of kids flip through the book, see all the puzzles, and automatically assume it will be too difficult, so they don't even attempt it. When I visit schools and put the first puzzle on the board, I ask the often lost-looking class to help solve it. Receiving little or no response, I go through it aloud, showing them step by step. When the next problem goes up on the board, kids start shouting answers."

Sachar has since produced several more books in the Wayside series: Wayside School Is Falling Down, More Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School, and Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger. In the latter, students are returning to the thirty-story-high school following a 242-day invasion of cows. The students' favorite teacher is being replaced by a series of substitutes who "try desperate measures to intimidate the children and undermine the school," wrote Brigitte Weeks in Washington Post Book World. "This is broad comedy," she added, explaining that readers "can laugh at Wayside School rather than with its pupils."

Sachar has also written a series of stories for younger readers--the "Marvin Redpost" chapter books--featuring Marvin, whose problems include nose-picking, questions about his identity, and troubles with his teacher. In the first title in the series, Marvin Redpost: Kidnapped at Birth?, nine-year-old Marvin, the only redhead in his family, thinks he was stolen from his real parents at birth. Marvin's friends agree that his concerns are quite valid, prompting the boy to confront his parents with his suspicions and urge them to get a blood test to prove him wrong. School Library Journal contributor Kenneth E. Kowen noted that the book is written almost totally in dialogue, praising the work as "fast paced, easy to read, and full of humor." Kowen concluded that Sachar's story "deals with issues of friendship, school, and being different, all handled with the author's typical light touch." In Marvin Redpost: Why Pick on Me? Marvin is unjustly accused of picking his nose and becomes a social outcast as a result. Deborah Stevenson had high praise for this beginning chapter book in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, noting that Sachar, "a consistently talented writer of books for grade-school readers," circumvented the usual cutesy pitfalls of writing easy-readers "to produce a tour de force of the genre, a trim tome of energy, hilarity, and wisdom." Marvin's latest adventure is described in Marvin Redpost: Super Fast, Out of Control, in which Marvin must live up to the fast-spreading word that he is going to ride his new bike down "Suicide Hill." "Sachar excels at the narrative counterpoint that keeps this kind of everyday-life story on its toes; he even manages a gently sly send-up of a police officer's class presentation about drugs and peer pressure (that Marvin, of course, can only relate to the pressure he feels to tackle the hill)," wrote Roger Sutton in the Horn Book Magazine.

Sachar continued in SATA, "Writing for elementary school students, I've tried to recall what it felt like for me to be that age, because despite the notion that times have changed, I think that kids in grade school are basically the same as they were when I was young.

"It's difficult to say where ideas for stories come from. I brainstorm until one idea leads to another which leads to another, and often it is the third or fourth idea which proves salvageable. I've started books, worked on them for a couple of weeks, and then abandoned the story for another. Through my first drafts, I never know what's going to happen, making the story terribly disorganized and subject to re-writes."

Sachar encountered censorship for the first time while writing The Boy Who Lost His Face. "Initially the book had the 'f' word in it. My editor approved it, knowing full well I don't use words indiscriminately; but right before the book was published, a consultant informed me that if I didn't take it out, I'd be killing the sales of the book, as well as hurt my other books, and possibly kill my career in the process. Every single word in my books is important to me; however, I also know that kids don't worry about individual words as much when they're reading as I do when I'm writing. Although I believed the word belonged where I had put it, I agreed to change the text, because it would not ultimately affect how readers responded to the book. I find it very interesting that what people often object to is the word itself, rather than to content. As much as I might back down and change a word, I would never consider altering the moral or political content of a story."

Now a husband and a father, Sachar initially had doubts about the effect a family might have on his work. "When I first started writing, I spent a great deal of time alone," he told SATA. "Solitude allowed me to think about a project at all times--even when not actually writing--and I was afraid that with someone else around, I'd lose valuable thinking time. But family life has given me a sense of stability which has improved my writing rather than hindered it."

In 1998, Sachar published his award-winning novel, Holes, which is the story of Stanley Yelnats, whose name, a palindrome, can be spelled backward and forward. The book focuses on the hero being wrongly sent to a camp for bad boys and his subsequent escape. In the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Roger Sutton concluded: "We haven't seen a book with this much plot, so suspensefully and expertly deployed, in too long a time." A Publishers Weekly critic added that it is a "dazzling blend of social commentary, tall tale and magic realism." School Library Journal contributor Alison Follos also praised Sachar's novel, maintaining, "A multitude of colorful characters coupled with the skillful braiding of ethnic folklore, American legend, and contemporary issues is a brilliant achievement. There is no question, kids will love Holes. "

Sachar makes it a practice never to discuss his work in progress because, as he told SATA, "by working on a book for a year without talking about it--even to my wife--the story keeps building inside, until it's bursting to be told and the words come pouring out when I sit down to write."

Regarding early works like Sideways Stories from Wayside School as "complete fantasy," Sachar believes it is more difficult to write books like There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, which strive for a deeper, more realistic level of characterization. "When you write something like Sideways Stories people tend to say, 'What an imagination it takes to think of all those fantastical things.' On the contrary, I think it takes a greater imagination to write realistic stories complete with realistic details. It's simple to invent, but to get to the heart of reality takes some real creativity."

Carla Sachar, writing in Horn Book Magazine, said about her husband that "writing is his love. How unbelievable to have a chance to do something every day that you relish doing. Creating a story never seems laborious to Louis, and his self-motivation--he sits in his office at his desk five days a week--is incredible."

Sachar feels that his secret to success is to "try to think of the world as a kid would see it," as he told U.S. News & World Report. "Then I write a story that I would like as an adult."

UPDATES
January 9, 2006: Sachar's Young Adult novel Small Steps was published by Delacorte. Source: USA Today, www.usatoday.com, January 10, 2006.
January 22, 2007: The American Library Association awarded Sachar's novel Small Steps the Schneider Family Book Award. Source: CNN, www.cnn.com, January 23, 2007.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Surname is pronounced Sack-er; born March 20, 1954, in East Meadow, NY; son of Robert J. (a salesman) and Ruth (a real estate broker; maiden name, Raybin) Sachar; married Carla Askew (a teacher), May 26, 1985; children: Sherre. Avocation: Chess, cards, skiing, playing guitar. Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 1976; University of California, San Francisco, J.D., 1980. Memberships: Authors Guild, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Addresses: Home--Austin, TX. Agent--Ellen Levine Literary Agency, 15 East 26th St., Ste. 1801, New York, NY 10010.

CAREER
Writer, 1977--. Beldoch Industries (manufacturers of women's sweaters), Norwalk, CT, shipping manager, 1976-77; attorney, 1981-89.-.