Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Manus Pinkwater (born November 15, 1941) is an American author of children's books and young adult fiction. His books include Lizard Music, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, Fat Men from Space, Borgel, and the picture book The Big Orange Splot. Pinkwater has also written an adult novel, The Afterlife Diet (1995), and essay collections derived from his talks on National Public Radio.

Many elements of his fiction are based on real events and people that Pinkwater encountered in his youth.

Early life, family and education

Manus Pinkwater was born on November 15, 1941, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. He describes his father, Philip, as a "ham-eating, iconoclastic Jew" and "gangster" who was expelled from Warsaw by the decent Jews. Pinkwater and his family moved to Chicago, where he was raised.

Pinkwater attended the Black-Foxe Military Institute in Hollywood, where he befriended Errol Flynn's son Sean, and wound up in high school back in Chicago. After graduating, Pinkwater attended Bard College, in New York State. An art major, he found the experience of studying art in a college unsatisfactory, and served an apprenticeship with sculptor David Nyvall in Chicago. After three years, Nyvall told Pinkwater that he would never make it as a sculptor, and Nyvall had always thought Pinkwater would be a writer. Pinkwater says that he always regretted the unkind things he said to Nyvall on that occasion.

A moment of fame came when he posed as Inspector Fermez LaBouche for the fumetti strip that ran in the final issues of Help! (September 1965); Pinkwater had been spotted at a party by Terry Gilliam. Pinkwater rode in a Volkswagen convertible to a photo shoot with Gilliam, Robert Crumb, and Help's creator Harvey Kurtzman—none of the men had any interest in the others. He met a children's book editor by chance at a party; Pinkwater invited her to his studio to promote a Tanzanian artist's cooperative, and she suggested that he illustrate a book. Pinkwater received a $1,500 advance for his first book, The Terrible Roar (1970), after replying that he would try to write the book himself.

With his wife, Jill, Pinkwater published a dog training book and ran an obedience school while living in Hoboken, New Jersey. At the time, he was training to become an art therapist, but found that he was unsuited to the work and dropped his studies. However, Pinkwater attended a meeting of an unspecified cult with a therapy client. He and Jill later joined the cult, then eventually left it.

Pinkwater is a trained artist and has illustrated many of his books, but for more recent works, that task has passed to his wife, Jill. Pinkwater's artistic technique varies from work to work, with some books illustrated in computer drawings, others in woodcuts and others in Magic Marker.

Pinkwater varies his name slightly between books (for instance, "Daniel Pinkwater", "Daniel M. Pinkwater", "Daniel Manus Pinkwater", "D. Manus Pinkwater"). He adopted the name Daniel in the 1970s after consulting his cult's guru, who said his true name should begin with a "D".

Themes

Pinkwater tends to write about social misfits who find themselves in bizarre situations, such as searching for a floating island populated by human-sized intelligent lizards (Lizard Music), exploring other universes with an obscure relative (Borgel), or discovering that their teeth can function as interstellar radio antennae (Fat Men from Space). They are often, though not always, set in thinly—or not at all—disguised versions of Chicago and Hoboken, New Jersey.

He often includes Chicago landmarks and folkloric figures from his childhood in 1950s Chicago, regardless of when the book is set. An example of this is the recurring character the Chicken Man, a mysterious but dignified black man who carries a performing chicken on his head. This character is based on a shadowy figure from 1950s Chicago; after Pinkwater made him a lead character in Lizard Music, he received letters from Chicago residents who remembered the Chicken Man. Pinkwater also pays tribute to the Clark Theater (a repertory movie theatre on Clark Street in the Chicago Loop that changed features daily and stayed open all night), Bughouse Square, and Ed & Fred's Red Hots.

Another common theme is Jewish culture, with character names referencing Yiddish phrases (for example, Shane Ferguson from Lizard Music is named after the phrase shoyn fergessen) or the characters themselves incongruously speaking in Yiddish-influenced dialogue or participating in Borscht Belt culture. Characters sometimes have surnames that append the "-stein" element familiar in some Jewish names to names suggesting other ethnicities (e.g., "Wentworthstein").

In 1995, Pinkwater published his first adult novel, The Afterlife Diet, in which a mediocre editor, upon dying, finds himself in a tacky Catskills resort populated by "circumferentially challenged" deceased.

Comics and radio

Pinkwater authored the newspaper comic strip Norb, which was illustrated by Tony Auth. The strip, syndicated by King Features, launched in 70 papers, but received nothing but hate-mail from the readers. Auth and Pinkwater agreed to end the project after 52 weeks. The daily strips were released in a 78-page collection by MU Press in 1992.

Pinkwater was a longtime commentator on All Things Considered on National Public Radio. He regularly reviewed children's books on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. For several years, Pinkwater had his own NPR show: Chinwag Theater. Pinkwater was also known to avid fans of the NPR radio show Car Talk, where he has appeared as a (seemingly) random caller, commenting, for example, on the physics of the buttocks (giving rise to the proposed unit of measure of seat size: the Pinkwater), and giving practical advice as to the choice of automobiles. In the early 1990s, Pinkwater voiced a series of humorous radio advertisements for the Ford Motor Company.