Hatchet
(Gary Paulsen)

Gary Paulsen was born in 1939 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When he was a child, he took refuge in a library one day when it was cold out and developed a love for reading. At the age of fourteen, he moved away from his alcoholic parents and joined a travelling carnival; this sense of adventure stuck with him for all of his life. While travelling with the carnival, he took on a variety jobs to support himself and concentrated on his writing. From 1958-1962, Paulsen was enlisted in the army and afterward he realized that he wanted to pursue his writing career full time. In order to gain experience in the publishing world, he took on a job as a magazine editor. Throughout his extensive career, Paulsen published more than forty novels, and 200 magazine articles, short stories, and plays; “Hatchet”, one of his better known novels, was written well into his career.

Paulsen often used his own life experiences as influences for his writing, as is the case with “Hatchet”. In the novel, Brian’s difficult relationship with his parents and his experience in dealing with their divorce is drawn from Paulsen’s own tumultuous relationship with his parents while growing up. Paulsen also has an appreciation for nature and used his experiences in nature to describe Brian’s struggles to survive against all odds. Paulsen’s work also tends to draw from the cultural and social elements of the time when he was writing; in this light, he is one of a handful of writers of his era who succeeded in merging autobiography and fiction to find meaning in life and the world.