LIFE:
        Fellow author Michael Cart has said: “Robert Cormier is the single most important writer in the whole history of young adult literature.”
        Cormier was born January 17, 1925, and lived his entire life in Fitchburg and Leominster, MA, which became “Monument,” the setting for his novels.  He never moved further than three miles from the house where he was born.  He grew up in the French Hill neighborhood, so named for the French Canadians who had moved to the area to work in the factories around the turn of the century.  His father was one of these workers, an immigrant’s son who worked “in the shops” for 44 years while raising his family.
        Cormier grew up surrounded by family, living for a time in an apartment building owned by his grandfather.  As his family increased – he was the second of eight children - they moved to other houses, always remaining within French Hill.  Outside of his family, though, he was a bit of a loner – not particularly good at games, etc.  He told one interviewer that his favorite place as a child was the library and told another, “I always felt that I didn’t belong”.
        He attended St. Cecilia’s Grammar School, where he received his first outside encouragement as a writer when a seventh-grade teacher (a nun) complimented a poem that he had written, contributing to his sense of himself as a writer.
        The following year, his family home burned down.  The fire could be seen from his classroom, but when he started to run out, the nun made him stop to say several prayers before trying to rescue his mother and infant sister, who were at home. No one was injured but the nun’s action left him angry with the Church for a long time.
        After eighth grade, he attended public junior high and then high school, graduating in 1942.  While most of his fellow graduates went to war, but Cormier’s poor eyesight kept him home; he began to work in the local factory at night while taking day classes at Fitchburg State Teachers College.  One of his teachers there further reinforced his identity as a writer by sending a story Cormier had written to Sign, a Catholic family magazine, resulting in his first writing paycheck of $75.
        Encouraged by this success, Cormier left college to make a living as a writer, first writing radio commercials, then joining the Fitchburg bureau of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, and finally, in 1955, moving to the Fitchburg Sentinel.  There he remained until 1978, when he retired to be a full-time writer. Throughout his newspaper career, he wrote a human-interest column, first for the Telegram and then for the Fitchburg paper.  The latter column won a national award in 1974, and a collection of the columns was published in 1991.
         Cormier’s life continued to be firmly rooted in his community.  He met his wife, Connie, while attending a community dance – she was also a native of French Hill and a friend of his sister.  They married in 1948 and had four children.
        Even when he was working as a newspaperman, Cormier said, “I regarded myself as a novelist who was a reporter in order to support his family,” and he rather quickly began publishing short stories in various magazines.  While most of these stories were gentle in tone and subject, his critically praised first novel, Now and at the Hour (1960), which dealt fictionally with his anguish and grief over his father’s death, was much more intense.  “In the darkness of his grief Cormier had found the theme that was to move through all his novels: the nonhero who struggles to hang on to humanness even under siege from an all-powerful Them – or It.” (Campbell, Presenting 19)  He went on to publish two other novels for adults before The Chocolate War came along and changed everything.
         Cormier’s first young adult novel originated when his son came home from school with two bags of chocolates to sell.  Cormier suggested three options: to sell the candies, for the family to buy them, or to decline to sell.  Peter chose the last option. In the real world, nothing happened – it became something of a joke that he wasn’t selling the chocolates. Nevertheless, Cormier began thinking “what if” and the novel was born.
        Cormier did not immediately see it as a young adult novel, but his agent, Marilyn Marlow, recognized its potential.  “I felt [The Chocolate War] was closer to a young adult novel, a genre then in its infancy,” she said after his death.  “It seemed to be in the tradition of A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, but they were published as adult novels.”  (“Robert Cormier Remembered” 38)
        It took some time to find a publisher, but when The Chocolate War appeared in 1974, it caused a sensation.  Many reviewers didn’t know what to make of it; the influential library journal Booklistpublished its review with a black border, and others also reacted to the darkness of the novel’s vision.  However, it quickly found its readership. The year after its publication, The Chocolate War got more recommendations than any other young adult novel in a poll by the Adolescent Literature Association (Schwartz 4).  By 1985, 22,000 hardcover and 400,000 paperback copies had been sold.  “Cormier had found his theme, his tone, his audience.” (Campbell, Presenting 23)
         “The Chocolate War initiated a new level of literary excellence in the fledgling genre of young adult fiction.” (Campbell, “Farewell” 245) The novel’s success also profoundly shifted Cormier’s literary career: “With [The Chocolate War], I discovered the young adult audience and that audience discovered me.  My life was literally changed by the publication of this novel,” Cormier told the Internet Public Library.
        Cormier subsequently published several other YA novels, including the Phoenix Award-winning I Am the Cheese (1977; award came in 1997).  Then, a decade after he broke onto the YA scene, Cormier found himself writing a sequel toThe Chocolate War.  He was drawn to the subject because many of his readers wanted to know what happened to some of the characters and because he himself was curious, especially about Obie: “Secretly, I had identified more with Obie than with anyone else in the novel.” (Cormier 4)
         Cormier’s first several novels were written in a corner office in his house, where his newspaper training enabled him to write despite the distractions of home life.  Later, after retiring from the newspaper, Cormier did much of his writing at a lakeside summer home near Leominster.  During the last year of his life, Cormier was working on his final novel, The Rag and Bone Shop, but took time to write a parish history for his lifelong church, St. Cecilia’s.  Cormier died in Boston on November 2, 2000, after a brief hospitalization.

         In contrast to Salinger, Cormier was very accessible to his admirers.  It was widely known that he had published his own telephone number in I Am the Cheese, his second novel.  Cormier would answer calls in character as the father of Amy, the protagonist’s friend, and would discuss his writing with the callers. (In the novel, Amy’s dad, like Cormier, is a newspaper editor; Cormier played the dad in a film version of the book.)
        In a 1998 interview, Cormier observed, “. . . there is a difference in that the 11-year-old writing to me today sounds like the 16-year-old of 20 years ago.  My readers are getting younger; I get letters now from fifth and sixth graders.” (Campbell, “Conversing”)
         Among his literary influences, Cormier cited Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, J.D. Salinger, and John O’Hara.   One of his editors recalled Cormier explaining that Hemingway had inspired him because “in Hemingway he discovered that you didn’t need to use a lot of fancy three or four-syllable words to be a great writer.  The language he knew, the language of Leominster, would do.” (Karen Wojtyla in “Robert Cormier Remembered” 39)  But in particular he admired Graham Greene, whom he called the “mentor of my mature years . . . an author I try to emulate not imitate.” (IPL) “
        Campbell identifies several typical features in his writing: short, fast-moving scenes with spare dialogue, apparently simple stories with intricate deep structures and layers of meaning, an intense emotional element, and “a dark awareness of evil as an implacable obstacle” (“Farewell” 246).  In Cormier’s work, the protagonists typically “are more tragic than not” because they usually lose out to the evil; it would be “absurd” if they succeeded (in that it does not reflect the reality of our world, where evil still operates) (Ellis 19).

SOURCES: Judith Bugniazet, “A Telephone Interview with Robert Cormier,” In Two Decades of The ALAN Review,  Eds. Patricia P. Kelly and Robert Small, Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1999, 8-14  (Rpt. from The ALAN Review 12:2 (Winter 1985) 14-18); Patricia J. Campbell, “A Loving Farewell to Robert Cormier,” The Horn Book 77:2 (March 2001) 245-48; Campbell, “Conversing with Robert Cormier.” Amazon.com Interview (Online); Campbell, Presenting Robert Cormier, Boston: Twayne, 1985; Robert Cormier, “The Pleasures and Pains of Writing a Sequel,” In Two Decades of The ALAN Review,  Eds. Patricia P. Kelly and Robert Small.  Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1999, 3-7  (Rpt. from The ALAN Review 12:2 (Winter 1985) 1-3); W. Geiger Ellis, “Cormier and the Pessimistic View,” In Two Decades of The ALAN Review, Eds. Patricia P. Kelly and Robert Small.  Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1999, 15-20 (Rpt. from The ALAN Review 12:2 (Winter 1985) 10-12, 52), Lyn Gardner, “Robert Cormier,” The Guardian, November 6, 2000. [Obituary] Online: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,393333,00.html; Internet Public Library Youth Division, “Ask the Author: Robert Cormier” (Online); “Robert Cormier,” Something About the Author, 83:35-41; “Robert Cormier Remembered,” Publishers Weekly, 248:1 (January 1, 2001) 38-39; Sheila Schwartz, Teaching Adolescent Literature: A Humanistic Approach, Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1979; Dawn B. Sova, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, New York: Facts on File, 1998; Teachers@Random, “Authors/Illustrators: Robert Cormier, 1925-2000” (Online); Dianne Williamson, “Censorship an endless challenge,” Worcestor (Mass) Telegram and Gazette, June 13, 2000.

Useful Websites about Robert Cormier:
   Ask the Author: Robert Cormier (Internet Public Library)
   Conversing with Robert Cormier (Amazon.com Interview)
   Robert Cormier, 1925-2000 (Teachers@Random)

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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