My students and sons loved him.Reply Solved! to the comment that answers your post. Want to turn a teen onto reading? Try some William Sleator. I was always an oddball, a nothing in the eyes of the ruling clique.”Īs a writer he said he “constantly is trying to combat adolescent peer pressure and the notion that not being like everyone else isn’t the worst thing in the world.” He wrote in Oddballs: “I never had the right clothes, I was lousy at sports, I couldn’t catch on to the slang, and the tuft of hair on the back of my head wouldn’t lie flat. Throughout, Sleator felt he was an outsider. Car games, sibling threat games, lying games, telephone games, making fun of others in junior high games– the Sleators did it all. His autobiographical collection of stories, Oddballs, chronicles the antics of his own adolescence. He never forgot what it was like to be a teenager. He began keeping a journal at age 13, and said he continued to do so “obsessively.” For him, the act of writing down his adolescent emotions preserved them in his head.

Sleator began writing early- his first novel, 17 words long, called The Fat Cat he self-published at age 6. With the 1995 publication of Dangerous Wishes, his 22 nd book, Sleator achieved one of his own dreams- to write a book set in a foreign country. A visit to Thailand in 1986 captivated him, enticing him to remain. Witnessing all the backstage drama prepared him to be a writer, he said.

Sleator attended Harvard, majored in English and then worked as a rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet Company. Teens in Others See Us read minds in House of Stairs they respond to operant conditioning, in Interstellar Pig aliens disguised as humans must engage in a role-playing game that threatens their species. His characters, often based on his family and friends, confront dangerous and evil situations that challenge them to use their wits to survive. Imagination, contended Sleator, allows the mind to escape from reality, and is a practical skill for dealing with everyday life. Sleator’s novels leave readers uncertain about endings and uneasy about characters. I met Sleator in 1996 when he addressed a graduate “Adolescent in Literature” class at New Jersey City University and interviewed him for SIGNAL, the International Reading Association’s journal devoted to young adult literature. Sleator, who died August 3 in Thailand, took topics from science and stretched them into the paranormal, creating tales that keep teen readers rapt and reading into the night. The fodder of science fiction and a few of the many themes writer William Sleator addressed in his 30 novels for adolescents. Cloning, genetic engineering, black holes, dystopia.

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