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Author Background Post


From a young age, Gary Paulsen was rounding up his own meals in the forest, but also providing his own clothing and shelter, too. He told TeachingBooks.net in a 2010 interview, “I was raised on farms by people who didn't have Wal-Mart. They had to make their own sleds, harnesses, clothing, etc.” The 54 days 13-year-old Hatchet protagonist Brian Robeson spends in the Canadian wilderness are based on Paulsen’s own late childhood and adolescence. During that time, he frequently “fostered” himself in the woods away from his parents, whose rocky marriage made Paulsen’s young life unhappy. Among other things, that meant he needed to find his own food, often by extending its definition. In his 2001 non-fiction work Guts: The True Stories Behind ‘Hatchet’ and the Brian Books, Paulsen talks foraging and scavenging (and goes beyond comparatively tasty mouthfuls of grubs) in the chapter “Eating Eyeballs and Guts or Starving: The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition," pointing out that hunger is “the best sauce.”



Other works by Gary Paulson:

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