Cormier, Robert, 1925-2000.Robert Edmund Cormier
novelistHis acclaimed, controversial 1974 young-adult novel The Chocolate War was listed as one of the books most frequently banned in schools.
American novelist whose work was a hotline to the hearts and minds of teenagers all over the world
Lyn Gardner
Monday November 6, 2000
The GuardianFrom the moment The Chocolate War, a coruscating attack on intimidation and corruption in an American catholic school, was published in 1974, the author Robert Cormier, who has died aged 75, was continually raising the stakes about what could be written about for young readers.
His position was simple: "There are no taboos," he told the Guardian this summer in what was to be one of his final interviews. "Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55."
Cormier's books were as good as his word: Tenderness charted a promiscuous young girl's fixation with a serial killer; The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, set among the terminally ill teenage inmates of an experimental medical institution, was a bleak portrayal of dying despair lit by tiny moments of joy, and his psychological thrillers such as We All Fall Down and I Am Cheese never flinched at the cruelties that humans inflict upon each other.
Not surprisingly, his grim realism and stories that ignored the conventions of the teenage novel by telling it like it really was - with no happy endings and no adults prepared to lend a helping hand - brought him into conflict with parents' groups in the US, who believed that it was unsuitable material for sensitive adolescents. There were frequent attempts to ban his work in schools and libraries in America.
Speaking at a conference on censorship earlier this year, Cormier declared: "I have my own standards. Tenderness is a very tough book. But it's written in a minor key. When you're dealing with a serial killer and a sexually precocious girl, it's easy to let the blood flow and the sex roll. The harder part is to contain it and suggest it. So my conscience is clear. As to that sensitive child out there, I know they exist, but maybe a good dose of the truth would be a warning for what's waiting. You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset."
Cormier was born into a large family in French Hill, a French-Canadian neighbourhood of Leominster, Massachusetts. The second of eight children, he showed an early flair for writing. He never lived further than three miles from the house where he was born and, for almost 30 years, he worked as a journalist on the local paper, covering everything from the police news to births, deaths and weddings. "All the stories I'll ever need are right here on Main Street," he said.
It wasn't until he was in his late 40s that he produced his first novel for teenagers. Thereafter, in his 13 books, Leominster became fictionalised as Monument and French Hill as Frenchtown, the latter most memorably in Cormier's last book, Frenchtown Summer, an elegiac account of a paperboy's journey to self-awareness as he walks the streets of his home town 50 years ago. As in all of Cormier's books there was a darkness lurking beneath the sunlit surface. As Cormier's editor was to note, the book might be hauntingly beautiful, but Cormier still managed to get a dead body into it. In the strongly autobiographical world of Cormier's novels, that was because there really had been one: when Cromier was a boy the town had been traumatised by a local murder.
One of Cormier's greatest strengths as a writer, besides a rhythmic flow and brilliant use of simile and metaphor, was his ability to take ordinary American suburban life and show it from the perspective of the child who sees all the things that the adults have missed or prefer to ignore. Cormier's adults are often rather complacent, blissfully unaware of their offsprings angst or the dangers they are facing.
The loneliness and sense of being an outsider that Cormier had experienced as a bookish child, who was picked upon in the street, became translated into a series of main characters who were all loners. "I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence," he said.
Despite this, Cormier, a genial man with a birdlike inquisitiveness, had a long and happy marriage to his wife Connie and raised four children. It was the experiences of one of his teenage sons, who refused as a matter of principle to take part in his school's annual fund-raising sale, that was to inspire The Chocolate War.
When Cormier sent the novel to his agent he was surprised to be informed that he had written a book for teenagers. It was an approach that was to stand him in good stead. "I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are."
The result was a rare writer who appeared to have a direct line to the hearts and minds of his young audience and made sure that they also had one to him. In a typically Cormier touch, he included his own telephone number as that of Amy Hertz's in I Am Cheese. The resulting thousands of calls became his personal hotline to contemporary teenagers.
• Robert Edmund Cormier, author, born January 17 1925; died November 2 2000.
An Interview with Robert Cormier
CORMIER, ROBERT
January 17, 1925-Nov.2, 2000.
AuthorBiographical Statement: 1983 Biography from Fifth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators --1999 update
Pronunciation: (COR me ay)
Robert Cormier was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, where he and his wife still make their home. He attended Fitchburg State College for a year and began his writing career at radio station WTAG in Worcester in 1946. In 1948 he moved into print journalism, first as a reporter with the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, and then at the Fitchburg Sentinel as a reporter and wire editor. He left this paper in 1966, and moved into freelance writing, both journalism and fiction. Cormier has received three awards for his journalism, two top prizes for newswriting from the Associated Press in New England, and an award for the best newspaper column from K.R. Thomson Newspapers, Inc. Fitchburg State College named him Doctor of Letters in 1977.
Robert Cormier published his first novel, for adults, in 1960. Now and at the Hour was followed by two other adult books: A Little Raw on Monday Mornings in 1963, and Take Me Where the Good Times Are in 1965. While these were well received, it was in 1974, with his publication of a novel for teenagers called The Chocolate War, that Cormier found himself the target of often hostile attention. The Chocolate War is about Jerry, a parochial school student who refuses to sell chocolates for the school's fund drive. For this he is ostracized and harassed by students and faculty alike, and finally he is savagely beaten and left unconscious at the close of the book.
The crude language, violence, cynicism, and particularly the undeniably dismal ending of the novel left many critics horrified. "I am disturbed by this book because, in spite of being brilliantly structured and skillfully written, it presents a distorted view of reality and a feeling of absolute hopelessness that is unhealthy," wrote Norma Bagnall in the American Library Association's Top of the News. A spirited defense of the book was provided in a rebuttal by Janet Polacheck: "If we give young adults only those books described by Norma Bagnall as desirable, which would give students adults worth emulating, show goodness and honor being rewarded, detail situations where hope is proved right, I suggest that that would present a warped view of the world. Young adults must learn that if they are going to stand firm for something, there will be times of absolute aloneness." The Chocolate War was named a best book of the year in 1974 by the New York Times and a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and was chosen for the School Library Journal "Best of the Best 1966-1978" list (December, 1979). It also won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979.
I Am the Cheese is a different kind of book, marked by psychological torture rather than physical brutality. Like The Chocolate War, it has a dismal ending, suggesting the incipient death of the youthful, maddened protagonist. It was named both a Notable Book for children and a Best Book for Young Adults by the ALA. A movie version of I Am the Cheese was released in 1983.
Cormier combined physical and mental anguish in After the First Death, in which a father sacrifices his son in the name of patriotism. While many have denounced Cormier's themes and apparent cynicism, even his detractors have admitted that he is a skillful writer. "When I read [After the First Death] I was appalled by the author's abuse of his considerable power to involve impressionable young readers," wrote Sister Avila in School Library Journal. In the same periodical Judith Rosenfeld urged "the very skillful author Robert Cormier to offer his readers another theme, if he has one." It was also named a Best Book for Young Adults by the ALA.
Cormier's next novel, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, published in 1983, concerns advances and ethics in medicine as it tells the story of a sixteen-year old boy who is treated with mind-altering drugs in an experimental hospital for the terminally ill.
Cormier followed this work with a sequel to the award-winning The Chocolate War, entitled Beyond the Chocolate War. Set at the same Catholic high school as the original story, this psychological thriller focuses on a student's plot to use a guillotine that is part of a magic act to murder another student. Cormier combines his customary strong characterizations and his ability to convey the many facets of evil to create a fascinating story. This book received an Honor List citation from Horn Book in 1986.
Cormier's next novel, Fade, which explores a young boy's ability to become invisible and the disturbing repercussions that flowed from this gift, was also well received, garnering a Young Adult Services Division Best Book for Young Adults citation from the American Library Association in 1988 and a World Fantasy Award nomination in 1989.
Cormier has continued to enhance his reputation as a peerless writer of unsentimental, thought-provoking young adult fiction into the 1990s. His We All Fall Down, published in 1991, tells of a boy who, along with some friends, trashes a house and puts a young girl into a coma, then begins a relationship with the girl's sister. Horn Book praised this tale as "A riveting book that leaves an unforgettable impression." In Tenderness, a 15-year-old runaway named Lori becomes obsessed with a serial killer. A review in Booklist called it a "mesmerizing plunge into the mind of a psychopathic teen killer that is both deeply disturbing and utterly compelling." Cormier's latest work, Heroes, is a powerful story of vengeance, in which an 18-year-old, whose face was blown off by a grenade in France during World War II, returns to his hometown bent on murdering the man who raped his girlfriend. All of these books combine great storytelling ability with gripping characterizations to examine unflinchingly the darker side of human nature.
According to Donald Gallo, Robert Cormier the man is very different from what readers might expect. Gallo wrote in the ALAN Review that when "the first time readers of his recent novels meet Robert Cormier they are amazed to find him so soft-spoken, so friendly, so personable, so generous, so honest. . . . This unsentimental novelist seems quite sentimental as a person."
In addition to his novels, Robert Cormier has also written many short stories that have appeared in various magazines. Nine of these are found in Eight Plus One, a collection for young adult readers that was named a Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies by the joint committee of the National Council for the Social Studies and the Children's Book Council. These stories, according to Cormier's introduction, derive their impetus from his experiences with raising his four children, particularly when they were teenagers. He was struck by the similarity between their experiences and the ones he had as an adolescent. "I began to write a series of short stories, translating the emotions of both the present and the past--and finding they were the same, actually--into stories dealing with family relationships, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons." It is a collection of quite tender stories in which the author hopes his readers "will meet that other Robert Cormier."
Cormier has also published another volume of short stories, I Have Words to Spend: Reflections of a Small-Town Editor. This collection contains 85 stories that Cormier originally wrote as newspaper columns during his days as a journalist.
Works by subject:
Selected Works: The Chocolate War, 1974; I Am the Cheese, 1977; After the First Death, 1979; Eight Plus One, 1980; The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, 1983; Beyond the Chocolate War, 1985; Fade, 1988; Other Bells for Us to Ring, 1990; I Have Words to Spend: Reflections of a Small Town Editor, 1991; We All Fall Down, 1991; Tunes for Bears to Dance To, 1992; In the Middle of the Night, 1995; Tenderness, 1997; Heroes, 1998.
Works about subject:
Suggested Reading: ALAN Review, Fall 1981; Collier, Laurie, and Nakamura, Joyce, eds. Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 1993; English Journal, Sep. 1977; Estes, Glenn E., ed. American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction, vol. 52, 19??; Hile, K. S., ed. Something About the Author, vol. 83, 1996; New York Times, Aug. 31, 1998; Children's Books and Their Creators, Silvey, Anita, ed. 1995.
Additional citations:
Kelly, Patricia P. An interview with Robert Cormier; Journal of Youth Services in Libraries (ISSN: 0894-2498) v7 57-63 Fall 1993
Drew, Bernard A. The 100 most popular young adult authors; biographical sketches and bibliographies. Libraries Unlimited 1997
Sutton, Roger. A conversation with Robert Cormier: "kind of a funny dichotomy"; School Library Journal (ISSN: 0362-8930) v37 28-33 Je 1991
Drew, Bernard A. The 100 most popular young adult authors; biographical sketches and bibliographies. Libraries Unlimited 1996
Something about the author, v83; facts and pictures about authors and illustrators of books for young people. Gale Res. 1996
Biography today: author series, v1, 1995; profiles of people of interest to young readers. Omnigraphics 1996
Major authors and illustrators for children and young adults; a selection of sketches from Something about the author. Gale Res. 1993
Self, David. Writing dangerously; The Times Educational Supplement (ISSN: 0040-7887) v3776 53 N 11 1988
Cormier, Robert. I have words to spend; reflections of a small town editor. Delacorte Press 1991
Major 20th-century writers; a selection of sketches from Contemporary authors. Gale Res. 1991
Speaking for ourselves; autobiographical sketches by notable authors of books for young adults. National Council of Teachers of English 1990
Something about the author, v45; facts and pictures about authors and illustrators of books for young people. Gale Res. 1986
Rosenberg, Merri. Teen-agers face evil; The New York Times Book Review (ISSN: 0028-7806) 36 My 5 1985
Nodelman, Perry. Robert Cormier does a number; Children's Literature in Education (ISSN: 0045-6713) v14 94-103 Summ 1983
Profile of Robert Cormier copyright © H.W. Wilson Company.
