Gary Paulsen
Uploaded by kalyserb on Nov 23, 2005
[color=blue:5315997e08]Gary Paulsen[/color:5315997e08]Gary Paulsen was born on May 17, 1939. Gary was forced to grow up fast. Gary’s family never had much money while he was growing up. Gary had a miserable home. Both his parents were drunks. His dad worked in the Military and Gary moved various times because of his father’s job. Sometimes Gary would sell newspapers in an alley or help at the bowling alley to make a little bit of money. When things got unbearable Gary would either run away or was taken to relative’s houses to stay for a while.
Gary hated school. He had a D- average and wasn’t good at athletics either. He also had a bad reputation for getting in fights with other peers. One night Gary was selling newspapers in the twenty below temperatures, and saw the public libraries reading room bathed in beautiful golden light. At that point very few people had given Gary anything. Both his parents were drinking and it was a very rough run. He went in to get warm and to his astonishment the librarian asked him if wanted a book. He said sure in a sort of cocky tone and then she said to him “bring it back when you’re done and you can get another one.” First is took him a month to read a book, then two weeks, then a week, and pretty soon he was reading two books a week. She would give Gary westerns, science fictions, and everyone once in a while a classic. She didn’t care if Gary wore the right clothes or dated the right girls; none of those prejudices existed in the library. Hiding from his parent’s arguments, Paulsen would often retreat to their small apartment basement, snuggle beside the furnace with a book, milk, and some peanut butter sandwiches and read into the night. The librarian didn’t realize when she gave Gary a library card she had handed him the world.
Gary barely managed to graduate high school. After high school he went to college for a short time but then quit to join the army. There he worked with missiles and was positive his future lay in electronics. But after a while he realized their must be more to life than sitting behind a computer screen all day. So, faking an impressive resume he scored an associate editor’s job with a men’s magazine. Shortly after his bosses discovered...