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The Pigman | Introduction

Paul Zindel's first novel, The Pigman, published in New York in 1968 by Harper & Row, is a story of two dispossessed young people who find a surrogate parent in Angelo Pignati, an Italian man who has never had children and whose wife is dead. He shares his humor and joy in life with them, and in his presence, they are allowed to be carefree and childlike in a way that they can't be with their own families.

The novel is considered by many critics to be the "first truly [young adult] book," according to Teri Lesesne in an interview with Zindel in Teacher Librarian. When Zindel wrote the book, he realized that few books depicted teenagers dealing with real problems in the modern world. He also talked to many teenagers who said they hated to read or had been branded as troublemakers, and he targeted his story to them. Zindel's honesty and humor "broke new ground, and prepared the soil" for many excellent young adult books to come, according to Lesesne.

In an interview with Scholastic students, Zindel said that he was inspired to write the book while he was house-sitting in a fifty-room "castle" on Staten Island. A teenage boy trespassed on the grounds, and when Zindel went out to yell at him, he found out that the boy was actually a very interesting person. The character of John Conlan in The Pigman was modeled on this young man. The character of Lorraine was modeled on a student in one of the chemistry classes Zindel taught. He told the interviewer, "I thought, what a wonderful adventure it would be to team those two life models for me into a story in which they met an eccentric, old mentor figure."

The Pigman Summary

Told in chapters alternating from Lorraine's and John's point of view, The Pigman opens with an "Oath," signed by both John and Lorraine, two high school sophomores, in which they swear to tell only the facts, in this "memorial epic" about their experiences with Angelo Pignati, whom they later refer to as the "Pigman."

Harmless Pranks Accelerate
John, one of two protagonists who act as narrator, explains that he hates school, in fact hates "everything," and tells about his past escapades, in which he set off firecrackers in the school bathroom and organized his whole class to roll damaged apples across the classroom floor when the substitute teacher had her back turned. Intelligent, charming, and bored, he's not a bad kid, but is pent-up and restless, with parents who don't understand him and don't want to try.

Lorraine, the other protagonist and narrator of the book, is similarly alienated from her family, which consists only of her mother. Her father, who left when her mother was pregnant with her, is now dead, and her mother works as a private nurse to try and make ends meet. Like John, Lorraine is very intelligent; she wants to be a writer. A keen observer of people, she is compassionate and sensitive. She and her mother moved into John's neighborhood at the beginning of freshman year, and Lorraine and John, perhaps drawn by their mutual restlessness and alienation, have since become good friends.

Lorraine and John, with two other friends, play more pranks outside of school. They devise a game in which the challenge is to call strangers on the phone and keep them on the line for as long as possible by telling outlandish stories. Picking numbers at random from the phone book, Lorraine eventually calls Angelo Pignati, an old man who lives in their neighborhood. He's only too happy to talk to them, and when Lorraine tells him they're calling from a charity and asking for money, he unwittingly offers to give them ten dollars.

Lorraine thinks the joke has gone too far and wants to end the phone call, but John gets on the line and makes arrangements to pick up the money from Mr. Pignati at his house. John tells her Mr. Pignati is probably lonely and will welcome their company.

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