The Cartoonist (Puffin Books) - Softcover

Betsy Byars

3.55

208 ratings by Goodreads

9780140311822: The Cartoonist (Puffin Books)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140311823 ISBN 13: 9780140311822

Publisher: Puffin Books, 1981

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Alfie dashed up to his attic to draw funny cartoons at every possible moment. Life, as Alfie saw it, was in those cartoons, and they were a secret world more precious to him than the one around him. When his family try to take over the attic, Alfie barricades himself in, determined to sit it out.

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About the Author:

Betsy Byars began her writing career rather late in life. "In all of my school years, . . . not one single teacher ever said to me, 'Perhaps you should consider becoming a writer,'" Byars recalls. "Anyway, I didn't want to be a writer. Writing seemed boring. You sat in a room all day by yourself and typed. If I was going to be a writer at all, I was going to be a foreign correspondent like Claudette Colbert in Arise My Love. I would wear smashing hats, wisecrack with the guys, and have a byline known round the world. My father wanted me to be a mathematician." So Byars set out to become mathematician, but when she couldn't grasp calculus in college, she turned to English. Even then, writing was not on her immediate horizon.

First, she married and started a family. The writing career didn't emerge until she was 28, a mother of two children, and living in a small place she called the barracks apartment, in Urbana, Illinois. She and her husband, Ed, had moved there in 1956 so he could attend graduate school at the University of Illinois. She was bored, had no friends, and so turned to writing to fill her time. Byars started writing articles for The Saturday Evening Post, Look,and other magazines. As her family grew and her children started to read, she began to write books for young people and, fortunately for her readers, discovered that there was more to being a writer than sitting in front of a typewriter.

"Making up stories and characters is so interesting that I'm never bored. Each book has been a different writing experience. It takes me about a year to write a book, but I spend another year thinking about it, polishing it, and making improvements. I always put something of myself into my books -- something that happened to me. Once a wanderer came by my house and showed me how to brush my teeth with a cherry twig; that went in The House of Wingscopyright � 2000 by Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

A saucily told, sparely written story of a boy who finds his only refuge in the attic, where he can spend hours drawing. Ages 8-12.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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