English 240 - Literature for Younger Readers
Dr. Wally Hastings - Northern State University  

 

 

Christopher Paul Curtis

(1954- )

 

LIFE:

      Curtis was born in 1954, which means that in 1963 he was approximately the same age as Kenny Watson in The Watsons Go to Birmingham.  Before Christopher came along, his father was a chiropodist (foot doctor) in a poor neighborhood in Flint; he gave up this practice to go to work for General Motors, which paid better, and later worked for the United Auto Workers and for an association of housing cooperatives.  His mother was a homemaker who later lectured on black history in the local schools.  Both parents were part of the civil rights movement.

      Curtis said he read a lot as a child, “but books didn’t really touch me, probably because there weren’t a lot of books for or about young black children” (CA 5 – interesting comment in light of Joetta’s reaction to the gift of a white doll); nevertheless, he early developed an ambition to become a writer.  However, it took him a while before he seriously pursued this dream.  He attended college for a year, but withdrew to work full time in the Flint auto-body plant where his father also worked; he remained there for 13 years.  He left the factory in 1985 and worked as an aide to a Michigan senator and in other positions while returning to college to work on his degree in political science.  In 1993, he won a writing award from the University of Michigan-Flint for an essay he wrote about his factory experience. 

      Curtis met his wife, a Trinidadian nursing student, while at a basketball game in Canada in 1978.  After the publication of Watsons, they moved with their two children to Windsor, Ontario, which was closer to her family.  He ultimately finished his degree at the University of Michigan-Flint after publication of Bud, Not Buddy.

      Curtis acknowledges using himself and members of his family as models for characters; different aspects of his own personality appear in both Kenny and Byron Watson.  Byron’s fascination with fire comes from Curtis’s own childhood interest.

      Both of Curtis’s first two books were recognized by prestigious American Library Association awards.  The Watsons Go to Birmingham, his first published novel, was named a Newbery Honor book for 1996 and also a Coretta Scott King honor book the same year; Bud, Not Buddy won both awards in 2000.  He is the only writer ever to win both prizes in the same year.  His use of humor in stories that otherwise concern the harsh realities (the church bombings in Watsons, the Depression and orphan life in Bud, slumlords in Bucking the Sarge) of African-American life, both historically and in the present.

 

The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963

      The Watsons Go to Birmingham had its origins in a Curtis family trip to Florida to visit his wife’s relatives.  Along the way, he thought of writing a humorous novel about a similar family from Flint making a similar trip; he wrote a story, “The Watsons Go to Florida,” which won a writing award from the University of Michigan-Flint (the same year he won the award for his essay).  As he originally conceived it, it was just going to be a humorous book, and his wife encouraged him to work full-time as a writer by taking a one-year leave of absence from his job.  But Curtis says, “In the first version when I got them to Florida the story just died so I let it alone.” (Johnson and Georgis 427) While he was developing the book, his son came home with a poem about the Alabama church bombing and he reconceived the story, setting it in 1963 and with Birmingham as the destination.  Once he made that switch, he knew immediately how the book would end and in fact wrote the last chapter before the rest of the book was done (Johnson and Giorgis 427). The book was submitted to a writing contest at Delacorte Press, which it did not win – but it was accepted by the publisher anyway.

      The narrator, Kenny, is modeled on Curtis and his brother.

 

History 

Although Contemporary Authors (and possibly other sources) suggests that the bombing in Watsons is the one involving the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, Curtis states in his afterword that it is not – it is a fictional event paralleled to the actual bombing, along with other unsolved bombings in Birmingham at the time.  The timing seems to be different from that particular historical event, since the trip appears to take place during the summer – the original intent was to take Byron to live with his grandmother for the summer break from school.

SOURCES:  “Christopher Paul Curtis,” Contemporary Authors Gale Group On-Line; Nancy J. Johnson and Cyndi Giorgis, “2000 Newbery Medal Winner: A Conversation with Christopher Paul Curtis,” The Reading Teacher 54, 4 (December 2000/January 2001) 424-28

 

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

Updated December 10, 2005
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