Born: May 23, 1898

Birthplace: Los Angeles, California

Died: October 15, 1989

Place of death: Mount Kisco, New York

Principal Works

Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960)

The Black Pearl (1967)

Sing Down the Moon (1970)

Biography

Scott O'Dell was the award-winning author of several young adult novels. He received the Newbery Medal for Island of the Blue Dolphins in 1961 and Newbery Honors for The King's Fifth (1966), The Black Pearl (1967), and Sing Down the Moon (1970). In 1972, he received what many believe to be the most distinguished award in children's literature: the Hans Christian Anderson Award. Island of the Blue Dolphins was made into a successful feature film in 1964, and The Black Pearl was adapted for film in 1977. In 1982, O'Dell established the annual Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. The author told tales in which characters, often women, triumphed over adversity. “The only reason I write is to say something,” he told Conrad Wesselhoeft for the New York Times. “I've forsaken adults because they're not going to change, though they may try awfully hard. But children can and do change.”

Scott O'Dell was born Odell Gabriel Scott in Los Angeles, California, on May 23, 1898. O'Dell was a descendent of Sir Walter Scott, the author of Ivanhoe (1820), and excelled in school from a young age. After graduation, he attended Occidental College in California, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford University, and the University of Rome, though he never earned a degree. In 1918, he enlisted in the US Army but did not complete training in time to serve in World War I. After college, O'Dell critiqued scripts for Paramount Studios and worked as a cameraman and technical director. It was the era of silent films, and O'Dell worked on the classic films Ben Hur (1925) and The Sheik (1921). For the next thirty years, O'Dell worked a variety of different jobs as an editor for the Los Angeles Daily News and a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote novels for adults (his first, Woman of Spain, was published in 1934) and even tried his hand as an orange farmer. While writing a history of California called Country of the Sun (1957), O'Dell came across the story of a girl named Juana Maria, or the “Lone Woman of San Nicholas Island,” who was a member of the Nicoleño tribe. She served as the inspiration for his most famous novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960). After the success of Island of the Blue Dolphins, O'Dell devoted his career to writing novels for young adults.

O'Dell began going by “Scott O'Dell” after a typesetter accidently applied that name to an article he had written. O'Dell liked it and then had it legally changed in the early 1920s. He married Elizabeth Hall, a psychologist, writer, and magazine editor, in the 1960s. Hall completed and published O'Dell's unfinished manuscript, Thunder Rolling in the Mountains (1992) after O'Dell died of prostate cancer on October 15, 1989. O'Dell and Hall had two children and seven grandchildren.

Major Works

O'Dell did not set out to write a book for children. His idea for Island of the Blue Dolphins was born from a story he had read about a young American Indian girl called Juana Maria and his own anger at a growing number of hunters killing off the wildlife in the California community in which he lived. He wanted to tell a story that brought together themes of reverence for all life and forgiveness. In O'Dell's story, a twelve-year-old Nicoleño girl named Karana...