Zindel biography

My Biography
by Paul Zindel
(for Scholastic)

I grew up on Staten Island with my mother and sister.

When I was young, my father left the family, and I saw him about every other Christmas.

Zindel biography

My mother struggled to get money from him, and tried to keep us together, moving from apartment to apartment and coming up with "get-rich-quick" schemes. But because we moved around so much, each town offered a lush new backdrop for my imagination.

By the time I was ten I had gone nowhere, but had seen the world. I dared to speak and act my true feelings only in fantasy and secret.

Paul zindel biography

That's probably what made me a writer.

In high school, I wrote my first play. Some of my classmates got the impression I had a strange sense of humor — macabre, I believe, was the term they used. A group of student government officers asked me to create a hilarious sketch for an assembly to help raise money.

I decided that even if I could not succeed in the real worl