My Life & Books

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Los Angeles was a frontier town when I was born there on May 23, 1898. It had more horses than automobiles (we went to town in a rubber-tired buggy with a red fringe on top), and there were more jack rabbits than people! The first sound I remember was a wildcat scratching on the roof of our house. 

We moved a lot, but never far. To San Pedro, which was a part of Los Angeles, and Rattlesnake Island, across the bay from San Pedro, where three-masted ships sailed by. To Claremont, just east of Los Angeles, at the foot of Mount Baldy--sagebrush country where descendants of the first Spanish settlers lived. And to Julian, an old gold-mining town southeast of Los Angeles on the Mexican border, in the heart of the Oriflamme Mountains, the ancestral home of the Diegueno Indians. 

That is why, I suppose, the sound of the sea and the feel of the frontier are in my books. And why many of the people I have written about are Indians, Spaniards, and Chicanos. 

I graduated from Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California, the brightest boy, my teachers said, they'd ever had or hoped to have. I thought so, too. However, when I went to college I found to my great surprise that I was not the brightest young man in the world. Indeed, I found that most of my classmates were brighter than I was. Things had been so easy in elementary and high school, I hadn't needed to study. What's more, I didn't know how. That is why I wandered around from school to school--from Occidental College, to the University of Wisconsin, to the University of Rome, to Stanford. My first book, nonfiction, was published when I was twenty-five.I like to travel, chop wood, do stonework, plant trees and flowers. I wage lively contests over my vegetable garden with deer, rabbits, fox, skunks, water snakes, geese, ducks, possums, squirrels, chipmunks, and otter. I seldom win. 

Island of the Blue Dolphins, though it is based upon the true story of a girl who lived alone on a California island for eighteen years, came from the memory of my years at San Pedro and Dead Man's Island, when, with other boys my age, I voyaged out on summer mornings in search of adventure.One day we left the landlocked world and went to sea, each of us on separate logs. From the forests of Oregon, the logs had been towed into the harbor in great rafts. They were twelve feet long or longer, rough with splinters, and covered with tar. But to each of us young Magellans, they were proud canoes, dugouts fashioned by ax and fire, graceful, fierce-prowed--equal to any storm.We freed them from the deep-water slips where they waited for the sawmill. Paddling with our hands, we set to sea--to the breakwater and even to Portuguese Bend. We returned hours later, having circumnavigated the watery world. Some mornings, in sun or rain, we searched for devilfish among the sea-washed rocks off Dead Man's Island. 

Many of my stories, however, did not come from memory. Sarah Bishop, for instance. During the American Revolution, in the midst of the battle for New York, Sarah fled from the city and found refuge in a cave on Long Pond in northern Westchester County. (From the windows of the house I live in now I can see her cave on the hillside. Children come from all over to visit it in spring and summer.) What Sarah did during those years she hid from the war I can only imagine.Whether remembered or imagined, all of my stories are in a certain sense written not for children, but for myself, out of a personal need. Yet all of them exist in the emotional area that both children and adults share.Writing stories you hope children will read is more rewarding than writing for adults. Adults are not good correspondents. But if children like your books, they respond with thousands of letters.