The Pigman | Author Biography

Paul Zindel was born on May 15, 1936, in Staten Island, New York, and grew up on Staten Island with his mother and sister. His father, a police officer, abandoned the family when Zindel was very young, and Zindel rarely saw him. His mother struggled to make ends meet, and because of their poverty, the family moved often. Zindel felt like a misfit because he had no father and because the family moved so much, but later realized that this feeling of being different from others had fueled his imagination. He wrote his first play in high school, and enjoyed the praise he got from other students for his morbid sense of humor.

Paul Zindel
Paul Zindel

He attended Wagner College on Staten Island, where he studied chemistry, but also took a creative writing course with famed playwright Edward Albee who encouraged Zindel to write more plays. He wrote his second original play during his last year of college.

After college, Zindel worked briefly as a technical writer for Allied Chemical, but he hated the job. After six months, he quit and became a high-school chemistry and physics teacher. While teaching, he continued to write plays; his first staged play was The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, loosely based on his own life. The play won several awards, including Best American Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; it was produced on Broadway; and it was made into a film and a television drama.

Charlotte Zolotow, an editor for the publisher Harper & Row, was impressed by the play and asked Zindel if he had any novels in mind. She encouraged him to write The Pigman, his first novel, which was published in 1968. The novel was selected as one of the Notable Children's Books of 1940-1970 by the American Library Association and was named one of their Best of the Best Books for Young Adults in 1975. It was also one of the Child Study Association of America's Children's Books of the Year in 1968, and was given the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Text in 1969. The book was inspired by two teenagers Zindel met, a young man who had many of the adventures that later appeared in the book, and a young woman who was very much like Lorraine, one of the two main characters. The Pigman, an eccentric old Italian man, was based on an Italian grandfather who was a mentor to Zindel when he was young.

In 1969, Zindel quit teaching and became a full-time writer. In a profile published on the Scholastic Web site, he said, "I felt I could do more for teenagers by writing for them." He read several young adult books and felt that they had nothing to do with what teenagers were really like, and he resolved to write honestly from the teenagers' point of view. Since then, he has written many acclaimed books for young adults, including My Darling, My Hamburger, I Never Loved Your Mind, Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball!, The Undertaker's Gone Bananas, Confessions of a Teenage Baboon, Raptor, Loch, The Doom Stone, Reef of Death, and most recently, Rats.

In 1973, Zindel married Bonnie Hildebrand. They have two children, David and Elizabeth.

In the Scholastic profile, Zindel wrote, "I like storytelling. We all have an active thing that we do that gives us self-esteem, that makes us proud; it's necessary. I have to tell stories because that's the way the wiring went in."