A Long Way from Chicago | About the Author

Richard Peck spent the first eighteen years of his life in Decatur, Illinois, where he was born in 1934. Decatur was a middle- American town. Many of his characters are drawn straight from students who attended high school with him at Decatur High School, a fully integrated school when few were. The school population included farm kids, those of different races, kids from privileged and prominent homes, and the invisible poor—individuals from all walks of life.

Peck attended DePauw University in Indiana on a scholarship during the Korean War, and his good grades kept him out of...

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