SOURCE CITATION
"Gordon (Richard) Korman." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002.Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph provided by Scholastic, Inc.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Since publishing his first book when he was only fourteen years old, Canadian author Gordon Korman has written dozens of novels for children and young adults. Korman's trademark storylines--featuring slapstick humor, madcap adventures, and high-spirited, rebellious characters--have helped make his books popular favorites with school-age readers across Canada and the United States. "Many of Mr. Korman's plots revolve around the frustrations of rambunctious boys forced to submit to stuffy academic authorities," noted Leslie Bennetts in the New York Times, and frequently feature the recurring characters of "Boots and Bruno, who are roommates, best friends and incorrigible troublemakers." Korman, whose books have sold millions of copies, strives to write stories that provide a healthy dose of humor for his young readers. "My books are the kind of stories I wanted to read and couldn't find when I was ten, eleven, and twelve," he once remarked. "I think that, no matter what the subject matter, kids' concerns are important, and being a kid isn't just waiting out the time between birth and the age of majority. I hope other kids see that in my work."

Korman was born in 1963 in Montreal, Quebec, where his father worked as an accountant and his mother wrote an "Erma Bombeck-type column" for a local newspaper, as he told Bennetts. In elementary and junior high school, Korman was always fond of writing--especially his own brand of zany stories and scenarios. "I wasn't a big reader for some reason," he remarked to Chris Ferns in Canadian Children's Literature. "But I always tried to put in creativity where I could: if we had (to write) a sentence with all the spelling words for that week, I would try to come up with the stupidest sentences, or the funniest sentences, or the craziest sentences I could think of."

His writing career began at the age of twelve with a story assignment for his seventh-grade English class. "The big movies at the time were 'Jaws' and 'Airplane,' and everyone decided they were going to write action stories," he told Bennetts. "It was my mother who brought me down to earth. She told me to write about something a little closer to home." Korman created the characters of Boots and Bruno, whose escapades create havoc in a small private school, Macdonald Hall. "I got kind of carried away . . . and I accidentally wrote the first book," he told Ferns. "The characters sort of became real people to me, and they more or less wrote the book for me. The class had to read all the assignments at the end of the whole business, and a lot of people were coming to me and saying how they really liked it. I suppose anyone who writes 120 pages for class is going to attract a certain amount of attention anyway--and I just got the idea of seeing if I could get the book published." Korman sent his manuscript to the publisher Scholastic, Inc., and two years later at the age of fourteen experienced the publication of both his first book and first best seller, This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall.

After his initial success, Korman published books at the rate of one per year, writing them during summers when he was on vacation from school. At the age of eighteen he was voted the "Most Promising Writer under Thirty-five" by the Canadian Author's Association, and was a popular author on school and reading tours across Canada and the United States. He has added six more titles to his "Bruno and Boots" series, and has created several other popular series, including "Monday Night Football Club" and "Slapshots." In addition, Korman has created memorable characters in other funny novels: Bugs Potter, a rock-and-roll drummer who lives for his music, in Bugs Potter LIVE at Nickaninny; Simon Irving, who, in Son of Interflux, organizes a junior high school campaign to save school land being purchased by his father's corporation; and Artie in No Coins, Please, who, to the frustration of his counselors, pulls off scams for money whenever his summer-camp group visits the city. While Korman's characters display a healthy disrespect for authority, part of their wider appeal is that they draw the line between disrespect and anarchy. "I was writing at the time of 'Animal House,' and things like that," he told Ferns. "I think one of the things which makes the books fairly strong, so that they defy being compared to things like that, is that they don't cross that line. Considering how crazy the books are, I keep a firm foot in reality."

Zany humor is a staple in Korman's work, as seen in his "Nose Pickers" series. These books feature residents of the planet Pan. The Pants, as they are called, have developed sophisticated digitally activated computer systems implanted in their noses--which serve as the basis for much gross-out humor. Booklist reviewer Karen Hutt found Nose Pickers from Outer Space! filled with "slapstick humor" and "frenzied action." A Publishers Weekly contributor enjoyed the book's "fast-fire . . . wordplay and amusingly preposterous plot," and commended it as a "light and silly caper that will . . . bring on ample laughs."

Korman attributes another reason for his books' popularity to the fact that he portrays characters achieving power and success in an adult world. "Whatever an adult can do, somewhere in the world there's one sixteen-year-old who can do it as well," he commented to Ferns. "The problem is with the age level where kids are starting to be able to do things, but it still seems unnatural. And I think that's one of the reasons why books do well in that age bracket, which they're not really supposed to because of their presentation--because they address that situation of kids being able to triumph over the adults, and in many cases with the adults coming to terms with it."

Adult challenges and a more serious tone imbue Korman's three "Island" books, his first adventure series. In these novels, six troubled teenagers are enrolled in an Outward Bound type of program that requires them to spend a few weeks at sea together in a small sailboat. The titles of the novels--Shipwreck, Survival, and Escape--suggest the adventures that await this unusual crew as they deal with treacherous weather, the death of their captain, and other serious challenges.

In 1985 Korman received a B.F.A. degree in dramatic and visual writing from New York University. Since then, he has concentrated more on young adult novels. He has said he hopes one day to complete an adult novel. "I'm torn between doing something totally different, and going back," he once told Ferns, "I'd like--and I don't know whether it's a romantic notion or not--I'd like to write, not necessarily the great Novel that's going to reshape the world, but a book that makes the sort of splash that (Joseph Heller's) Catch-22 made. . . . What I see happening is that one day I'll set out to write about a seventeen-year-old character, and it'll just turn out that this guy isn't seventeen--he's twenty-three or so, and he's an adult. That's how I think the transition will come."

UPDATES
January 2004: It was announced that Korman's book, Jake, Reinvented, was published. Source: Books in Canada, January-February 2004.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born October 23, 1963, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; son of C. I. (an accountant) and Bernice (a journalist; maiden name, Silverman) Korman; married; children: one son. Avocation: Music, travel, sports. Education: New York University, B.F.A., 1985. Memberships: Writers Union of Canada, Canadian Society of Children's Authors, Illustrators, and Performers (CANSCAIP), Canadian Authors' Association, ACTRA, Society of Children's Book Writers. Addresses: Agent--c/o Hyperion Books for Children, 114 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER
Writer, 1975--