SOURCE CITATION
"Avi Wortis." 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 by Gary Isaacs and provided by Hyperion Books.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Avi Wortis is known to critics, teachers, parents, and particularly to young readers for his invitingly readable novels. His award-winning books, written under his first name only, include mystery, adventure, historical, supernatural, coming-of-age, and comic novels--and many that are a bit of all of these categories. While captivating even reluctant readers with fast-paced, imaginative plots and plenty of action, Avi's books also offer complex, thought-provoking, and sometimes disturbingly realistic reflections of American culture to adolescents. The author summed up his goals as a young adult novelist in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers: "I try to write about complex issues--young people in an adult world--full of irony and contradiction, in a narrative style that relies heavily on suspense with a texture rich in emotion and imagery. I take a great deal of satisfaction in using popular forms--the adventure, the mystery, the thriller--so as to hold my reader with the sheer pleasure of a good story. At the same time I try to resolve my books with an ambiguity that compels engagement. In short, I want my readers to feel, to think, sometimes to laugh. But most of all I want them to enjoy a good read."

Born in Manhattan in 1937 and raised in Boston, Avi grew up in an artistic environment. His great-grandparents and a grandmother were writers, two uncles were painters, and both parents wrote. His family was also quite politically active, aligned with radical movements emanating from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Politics and art led to lively family discussion in Avi's home. The author once explained that his extended family comprised "a very strong art community and what this meant for me as a child was that there was always a kind of uproarious sense of debate. It was all a very affectionate sharing of ideas--arguing, but not arguing in anger, arguing about ideas."

This early stimulation at home may have prepared Avi for challenges to come in his education. Although he was an avid reader as a child, difficulties in writing eventually caused him to flunk out of one school. He later learned that he has a dysfunction known as dysgraphia, a marginal impairment in his writing abilities that causes him to reverse letters or misspell words. "One of my aunts said I could spell a four letter word wrong five ways," he once commented. "In a school environment, I was perceived as being sloppy and erratic, and not paying attention." Despite constant criticism at school, Avi kept writing and he credits his family's emphasis on the arts for his perseverance. When papers came back to him covered in his teachers' red ink, he simply saved them, corrections and all. "I think there was so much criticism, I became immune to it," he once said. "I wasn't even paying attention to it. I liked what I wrote."

Like many teens, Avi felt like an outsider in many social circles. His family's political views gave him early knowledge of what it meant to be in a minority. "You always assumed that your point of view was quirky or different," Avi once commented. At school, aside from writing difficulties, he had some typical teenage insecurities. "When I was sixteen or seventeen I looked like I was twelve or thirteen. At that time that means a lot to you. It's hardly anyone's fault but you blame it on everybody, right?" Avi reflected: "I've led a very ordinary life in most respects. I think my adolescence was unhappy in the way that many adolescents' lives are unhappy. It has given me great empathy for the outsider."

Avi says that the first step on his course to writing professionally was reading. He learned more from reading--everything from comic books and science magazines to histories, plays, and novels--than he learned in school. Despite the skepticism of his teachers, he determined while still in high school to make a career of writing. Avi once commented, "After my junior year in high school, my parents were informed that I was in desperate need of a tutor, for somehow I had never taken the time to learn to write or to spell. That summer I met every day with a wonderful teacher who not only taught me writing basics, but also instilled in me the conviction that I wanted to be a writer myself. Perhaps it was stubbornness. It was generally agreed that was one thing I could not possibly do." Avi once commented that he still has the diary entry from his senior year of high school in which he logged his decision to be a writer, adding "I can't wait! I've made up my mind."

At Antioch University, Avi avoided English but enrolled in playwriting classes. "That's where I really started to write seriously," he once commented. "The first playwriting instructor that I had would say, 'this is the way you do it.' You didn't have much choice in it, you had to do it in a very specific way. He even had charts for you to fill out. And I think I learned how to organize a story according to this man's precepts. It didn't even matter what (his system) was except that I absorbed it. I think, although I'm not sure of this, that is still the structure I use when I write." One of the plays Avi wrote in college won a contest and was published in a magazine. The author said that during that time he wrote "a trunkful of plays but I would say ninety-nine percent of them weren't very good."

After working at a variety of jobs, Avi took a job in the theater collection of the New York Public library, beginning his twenty-five year career as a librarian. But his determination to be a writer never flagged. He had written nearly 800 pages of his "great American novel," when, through an odd series of events, he turned to children's literature. It all began with telling stories to his two sons, Avi once commented: "My oldest would tell me what the story should be about--he would invent stuff, a story about a glass of water and so forth. It became a game, and here I had a writing background so I was telling some fairly sophisticated stories."

Along with telling stories, Avi was a doodler, drawing pictures for fun. A friend who was writing a children's book, having seen his drawings, wanted Avi to provide illustrations. When the friend took the book with Avi's illustrations to a publisher, although the book was rejected, Avi was asked to illustrate other children's books. Arguing with the publisher that he was a writer and not an artist, Avi agreed to illustrate if he could also write the book. "Two weeks after this conversation, I was supposed to go to England on a library exchange thing, so I took a week off of work. Some neighbors were gone and I used their apartment. I put down all the stories that I had told my son and drew the pictures, all within one week. So this gets submitted to the publisher and of course she turned everything down. But--seven publishers down the road--Doubleday accepted it."

Avi's first children's book, Things That Sometimes Happen, was published--although without his artwork--in 1970. His publisher called one day and asked what name he wanted on the book. "That's an odd question to ask," Avi once remarked. "It was never an issue, but I thought about it, and I said, 'Oh well, just put Avi down,' and that was the decision. Just like that." Things That Sometimes Happen, a collection of "Very Short Stories for Very Young Readers," was designed with Avi's young sons in mind. For several years he continued to write children's books geared to his sons' reading levels, but he explained, "At a certain point they kept growing and I didn't. I hit a fallow period, and then I wrote No More Magic. Suddenly I felt 'This is right! I'm writing novels and I love it.' From then on I was committed to writing novels. I'll never do anything else."

Avi has written many different forms of the novel. Since several of his early works, including Captain Grey, Night Journeys, and Encounter at Easton, are set in colonial America, he quickly earned a reputation as a historical novelist. Avi's 1984 novel The Fighting Ground, winner of the Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award for children, presents one event-filled day in the life of Jonathan, a thirteen-year-old boy caught up in the Revolutionary War. The novel begins as Jonathan slips away from his family's New Jersey farm one morning in order to take part in a skirmish with the Hessians (German mercenary soldiers hired by the English). Jonathan sets out full of unquestioned hatred for the Hessians and for Americans who were loyal to the British--the Tories--and full of hope for a chance take part in the glory of battle. "O Lord, he said to himself, make it be a battle. With armies, big ones, and cannons and flags and drums and dress parades! Oh, he could, would fight. Good as his older brother. Maybe good as his pa. Better, maybe. O Lord, he said to himself, make it something grand!"

Avi portrays no grandeur in the war. Jonathan can barely carry his six-foot-long musket, and has a worse time trying to understand the talk among the men with whom he marches. The small group's leader is a crude individual who lies to the men and is said to be "overfond of killing." After a bloody and confusing skirmish, Jonathan is captured by three Hessians, and briefly comes to understand them as individual human beings. Later, when called upon to be the brave soldier he had yearned to be, Jonathan's harrowing experience reveals the delusion behind his wish. At the close of the novel the reader, along with Jonathan, is brought to an understanding of what war means in human terms. The Fighting Ground was widely praised by critics, many of whom expressed sentiments similar to those of a reviewer for the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books who, describing The Fighting Ground as "a small stunner," summarized that the novel "makes the war personal and immediate: not history or event, but experience; near and within oneself, and horrible."

Avi says he is more interested in finding a way to tell a good story and to provide a means of imagining and understanding the past than he is in presenting historical fact. "The historical novel is a curious construction," he once commented. "It represents history but it's not truly accurate. It's a style." He elaborated in an interview with Jim Roginski in Behind the Covers: "Somewhere along the line, I can't explain where, I developed an understanding of history not as fact but as story. That you could look at a field and, with only a slight shift of your imagination, suddenly watch the battle that took place there. . . . You have to have a willingness to look beyond things. . . . Take the Battle of Bunker Hill during the Revolution. The leader of the American troops was Dr. Warren, who was killed during the battle. His body had been so dismembered and disemboweled, the only way he could be identified was by the nature of his teeth. And it was Paul Revere who did it. When you tell the story of war that way, a much stronger statement about how ghastly war really is, is made."

In Something Upstairs: A Tale of Ghosts, Avi's 1988 combination of historical novel, ghost story, and science fiction, a young man discovers the ghost of a murdered slave in the historic house his family recently moved into in Providence, Rhode Island. He travels back in time to the days of slave trading, where he learns about the murder and, perhaps more importantly, about the manner in which American history is collectively remembered. Although Avi was widely praised for his historical representation in this work, the author once said that "the irony is that in those Providence books there is nothing historical at all; it's a kind of fantasy of my neighborhood." Like his narrator in Something Upstairs, Avi moved from Los Angeles to Providence; in fact, he moved into the historic house featured in this novel. The author once commented that in his neighborhood, just walking down the street can inspire a story. The move to Providence "was truly like going back in history."

The Man Who Was Poe, Avi's fictionalized portrait of nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe, intertwines fiction and history on several levels. Historically, Poe went through a period of severe depression and poverty, aggravated by alcoholism during the two years preceding his death in 1849. Avi, whose novel focuses on this period, said he became fascinated with Poe because he was so extraordinary and yet such "a horrible man." In the novel, a young boy, Edmund, has recently immigrated to Providence from England with his aunt and twin sister in order to look for his missing mother. When both aunt and sister disappear, the penniless boy must elicit help from a stranger--who happens to be Edgar Allen Poe. Poe, noticing similarities in Edmund's story to his own life and detecting material for his writing, agrees to help the boy. Between maddening bouts of drunkenness, Poe ingeniously finds a trail of clues. Edmund, who has been taught to defer to adults, alternates between awe of the great man's perceptive powers and despair at his madness.

Vividly reflecting the macabre tone of Poe's fiction, Avi portrays the old port city of Providence as a bleak and chaotic world in which compassion and moral order seem to have given way to violence and greed. The character Poe, with his morbid imagination, makes an apt detective in this realm until it becomes clear that he wants the "story" of Edmund's family to end tragically. Edmund's plight is a harsh one, relying on Poe as the only adult who can help him, while at the same time attempting to ensure that Poe's vision does not become a reality. A reviewer for the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, describing the novel as "a complex, atmospheric thriller," remarked that "Avi recreates the gloom of (the) 1840s . . . with a storyteller's ease, blending drama, history, and mystery without a hint of pastiche or calculation. And, as in the best mystery stories, readers will be left in the end with both the comfort of puzzles solved and the unease of mysteries remaining."

In another unique twist on the convention of historical novels, Avi's 1990 The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle presents the unlikely story of a very proper thirteen-year-old girl who, as the sole passenger and only female on a trans-Atlantic ship in 1832, becomes involved in a mutiny at sea. Holding her family's aristocratic views on social class and demeanor, Charlotte begins her voyage trusting only Captain Jaggery, whose fine manners and authoritative command remind her of her father. She is thus shocked to find that Jaggery is a viciously brutal and inhumane shipmaster. This discovery, along with her growing fondness for members of the ship's crew, gradually leads Charlotte to question--and discard--the values of her privileged background. As she exchanges her finishing school wardrobe for a common sailor's garb and joins the crew in its work, she reveals the strength of her character, initially masked by her restrictive upbringing.

In the adventures that follow, including a mysterious murder, a storm, and a mutiny, Charlotte's reeducation and emancipation provide a new version of the conventionally male story of rugged individualism at sea. The award-winning novel has received accolades from critics for its suspense, its evocation of life at sea, and particularly for the rich and believable narrative of its protagonist as she undergoes a tremendous change in outlook. The impact of Charlotte's liberation from social bonds and gender restrictions in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle has a powerful emotional effect on many of its readers. Avi once said that "many people, mostly girls, and even adults, have told me of bursting into tears" at the book's ending--tears of relief that Charlotte finds the freedom to realize herself as she chooses. In his Boston Globe-Horn Book Award acceptance speech, referring to the words of a critic who spoke of the "improbable but deeply satisfying conclusion" of the novel, Avi commented: "I am deeply grateful for the award you have given me today. But I hope you will understand me when I tell you that if the 'improbable' life I wrote lives in someone's heart as a life possible, then I have already been given the greatest gift a writer can receive: a reader who takes my story and endows it with life by the grace of their own desire."

Avi, although an enthusiastic reader of history, is by no means tied to the historical novel and delights in finding new ways to structure his stories. He once commented: "People constantly ask 'How come you keep changing styles?' I think that's a misquestion. Put it this way, 'What makes you so fascinated with technique?' and that's the answer. You know that there are a lot of ways to tell a story. To me that's just fun." With his extensive background in theater, it is no surprise that many of Avi's novels have roots in drama.

In 1984, Avi published S.O.R. Losers, a humorous contemporary novel about a group of unathletic boys forced by their school (which is based on Avi's high school in New York City) to form a soccer team. Opposing the time-honored school ethic that triumph in sports is the American way, the boys form their own opinions about winning at something that means little to them. In a team meeting, they take stock of who they are and why it's so important to everyone else that they should win their games. The narrator, who is the team's captain, sums it up: "Every one of us is good at something. Right? Maybe more than one thing. The point is other things. . . . But I don't like sports. I'm not good at it. I don't enjoy it. So I say, so what? I mean if Saltz here writes a stinko poem--and he does all the time--do they yell at him? When was the last time Mr. Tillman came around and said, 'Saltz, I believe in your being a poet!'"

Avi uses the humor infused in S.O.R. Losers to make a clear statement. He once said that he sees a certain irony in the American attitude toward education. "On the one hand, our culture likes to give a lot of lip service to support for kids, but on the other hand, I don't think the culture as a whole likes kids. And kids are caught in this contradiction. I ask teachers at conferences 'How many of you have athletic trophies displayed in your schools?' You know how many raise their hands. And I ask, 'How many of you have trophy displays for the best reader or writer?' Nobody raises their hands. And I say 'What is it therefore that stands as the essential achievement in your school?' With test scores falling, we need to make kids better readers, but instead we're interested in a minority of kids, mostly males, whose primary focus is sports."

With its narrator's deadpan reporting of the fiascos involved in being consistent losers in sports, S.O.R. Losers does more than make a point. Horn Book contributor Mary M. Burns, who called the novel "one of the funniest and most original sports sagas on record," particularly praised Avi's skill with comedic form. "Short, pithy chapters highlighting key events maintain the pace necessary for successful comedy. As in a Charlie Chaplin movie, emphasis is on individual episode--each distinct, yet organically related to an overall idea." Avi has written several other comic novels, including his sequel to S.O.R. Losers, Romeo and Juliet, Together (and Alive) At Last, and two well-received spoofs on nineteenth-century melodrama, Emily Upham's Revenge and The History of Helpless Harry.

Avi has also written several acclaimed contemporary coming-of-age novels, including A Place Called Ugly and Sometimes I Think I Hear My Name. His 1992 Newbery honor book, Nothing but the Truth is the story of Philip Malloy and his battle with an English teacher, Miss Narwin. With bad grades in English keeping him off the track team, Philip repeatedly breaks school rules by humming the national anthem along with the public address system in Miss Narwin's home room. Eventually, the principal suspends Philip from school. Because the school happens to be in the midst of elections, various self-interested members of the community exploit this story of a boy being suspended for his patriotism. Much to everyone's surprise, the incident in home room snowballs into a national media event that, in its frenzied patriotic rhetoric, thoroughly overshadows the true story about a good teacher's inability to reach a student, a young man's alienation, a community's disinterest in its children's needs, and a school system's hypocrisy.

Nothing but the Truth is a book without a narrator, relating its story through school memos, diary entries, letters, dialogues, newspaper articles, and radio talk show scripts. Presented thus, without narrative bias, the story takes into account the differing points of view surrounding the incident, allowing the reader to root out the real problems leading to the incident. Avi once commented that he got the idea for the structure of this novel from a form of theater that arose in the 1930s called "Living Newspapers"--dramatizations of issues and problems confronting American society presented through a "hodge podge" of document readings and dialogues.

Avi displays his sympathy to the "outsider" position of adolescence with his character, Philip Malloy. In all the national attention Philip receives as a patriotic hero, no one asks him what he feels or thinks, and no one seems to notice that he changes from a fairly happy and enthusiastic youth to a depressed and alienated adolescent. Philip's interest in The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton's novel about rival gangs of teenagers (written when Hinton was only seventeen years old herself), reveals that Philip would like to read about a world that looks like his own, with people experiencing problems like his. The Shakespeare plays assigned in school do not reach him. Avi once explained "It's not an accident that in the last decades the book most read by young people is The Outsiders. I wish Stephen King's novels were taught in the schools, so that kids could respond to them and talk about them." Avi does not hesitate to set complexities and harsh truths before his readers because, he once said, these truths are already well-known to children. "I think writers like myself say to kids like this, 'We affirm your sense of reality.' We help frame it and give it recognition."

Although writing full time, Avi maintains regular interaction with children by traveling around the country, talking in schools about his writing. "I think it's very important for me to hold these kids in front of my eyes. They're wonderfully interesting and they hold me to the reality of who they are." Avi once commented that children are passionate and honest readers who will either "swallow a book whole" if they like it, or drop it "like a hot potato" if they don't. In an article in School Library Journal, he provided a telling anecdote about his approach to children: "Being dysgraphic, with the standard history of frustration and anguish, I always ask to speak to the learning-disabled kids. They come in slowly, waiting for yet another pep talk, more instructions. Eyes cast down, they won't even look at me. Their anger glows. I don't say a thing. I lay out pages of my copy-edited manuscripts, which are covered with red marks. 'Look here,' I say, 'see that spelling mistake. There, another spelling mistake. Looks like I forgot to put a capital letter there. Oops! Letter reversal.' Their eyes lift. They are listening. And I am among friends."

Avi has proven that he is not sitting back on his laurels as his books continue to win praise. In his 1997 work What Do Fish Have to Do with Anything?: And Other Stories, Avi offers seven stories in which young adult protagonists realize the power they hold over their lives, as well as the lives of others. For example, in "What's Inside," a thirteen-year-old boy is able to convince his older cousin not to commit suicide. Booklist reviewer Michael Cart praised the "authentic emotional insights that provide the surprises and right-on rites of passage." Avi has also successfully penned fantasy fiction. Poppy, which received a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in 1996, tells the story of two deer mice, Ragweed and Poppy, who are about to marry when the self-proclaimed king of Dimwood Forest--an owl named Mr. Ocax--eats Ragwood, supposedly as punishment for neglecting to seek his permission to marry. Ann A. Flowers of Horn Book called Poppy "a tribute to the inquiring mind and the stout heart." Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books critic Roger Sutton wrote: "Sprightly but un-cute dialogue, suspenseful chapter endings, and swift shifts of perspective between Ocax and Poppy will make chapter-a-day readalouds cause for anticipation." Avi followed Poppy with the sequels Poppy and Rye and Ragweed.

Other works by Avi include Prairie School and The Secret School, both of which stress the need for education. Writing about Prairie School for the School Library Journal, reviewer Carol Schene noted, "This gentle story with a great message that is nicely woven into the daily events would make a pleasant read-aloud as well as a good addition to easy chapter-cook-collections." Hazel Rochamn, writing for Booklist, noted, "Avi's clear simple language never sounds condescending." In his review of The Secret School for School Library Journal, B. Allison Gray called it a "carefully plotted, enjoyable, old-fashioned tale" and noted, "The importance of education and dreaming of one's future are imparted in an entertaining way." In his book, The Good Dog, Avi tells a tale about a malamute that a reviewer for Publishers Weekly called "reminiscent of Jack London's The Call of the Wild." The reviewer also noted, "The action moves along at a crackling pace, reaching a crescendo in a dramatic moonlight confrontation."

Avi describes himself as a committed skeptic, yet reveals an idealistic center when he discusses children and their role in American culture. He believes that children have a different outlook than most adults. Avi once remarked: "When do you become an adult? Sometimes I think the difference is that psychological shift when you start to know that tomorrow is going to be the same as today. When you're a kid, there are still options, major options. For a writer like myself, a child is a kind of metaphor for regression to idealism and passionate concern: a metaphor for the ability to change or react, to be honest about all those things that as adults we tend to slide over as we make compromises to obligations and necessities." In an article for Horn Book he contrasted children's literature, which generally espouses values such as "sharing, nonviolence, cooperation, and the ability to love," to the adult world where power and self-interest seem to rule. "More than anything else," Avi asserted, "children's literature is about the place and role of the child in society. . . . If we--in the world of children's literature--can help the young stand straight for a moment longer than they have done in the past, help them maintain their ideals and values, those with which you and I identify ourselves, help them demand--and win--justice, we've added something good to the world."

Always willing to take on new creative challenges, Avi co-founded his partner Linda Wright the "Breakfast Serials" program in 1996. The project serializes into newspapers quality stories by various children's authors. Partnered with Newspapers in Education, the Breakfast Serials program works with more than 230 newspapers and reaches a potential thirty-eight million readers. The story, "Keep Your Eye on Amanda," written by Avi and illustrated by Janet Stevens, was the inaugural story for the project. As noted by Leda Schubert in School Library Journal, "some of our best children's authors have taken up the challenge of creating stories that are short, suspenseful, and that stick in the readers' minds from chapter to chapter."

As for young people who are thinking of becoming writers, Avi offered some sound advice on his Web site: "Listen and watch the world around you. Try to understand why things happen. Don't be satisfied with answers others give you. Don't assume that because everyone believes a thing it is right or wrong. Reason things out for yourself. Work to get answers on your own. Understand why you believe things. Finally, write what you honestly feel then learn from the criticism that will always come your way."

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Given name is pronounced "Ah-vee"; born Edward Irving Wortis, December 23, 1937, in New York, NY; son of Joseph (a psychiatrist) and Helen (a social worker; maiden name Zunser) Wortis; married Joan Gabriner (a weaver), November 1, 1963 (divorced); married Coppelia Kahn (a professor of English); children: Shaun Wortis, Kevin Wortis; stepchildren: Gabriel Kahn. Education: Attended Antioch University; University of Wisconsin--Madison, B.A., 1959, M.A., 1962; Columbia University, M.S.L.S., 1964. Memberships: PEN, Authors Guild, Authors League of America. Addresses: Home--2205-A Grove St., Boulder, CO 80302. Agent--Dorothy Markinko, McIntosh & Otis, Inc., 475 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10017.

CAREER
Writer, 1960--. New York Public Library, New York, NY, librarian in performing arts research center, 1962-70; Lambeth Public Library, London, England, exhange program librarian, 1968; Trenton State College, Trenton, NJ, assistant professor and humanities librarian, 1970-86. Visiting writer in schools across the United States.