![]() ![]() ![]() He discarded his first attempt after 80 pages when he realized he didn’t have much of a story and that perhaps he’d made his kid hero a little too heroic. Spinelli, who writes his first drafts in longhand, struggled to find the voice of Maniac Magee. Jerry Spinelli tossed out two early attempts at Maniac Magee before landing on the version that stuck. Spinelli took elements of Maniac Magee from so many sources-ranging from a photograph to a newspaper column to his own childhood experiences-that in a 1991 piece for The Reading Teacher he described the book’s inspiration as “a patchwork quilt” that would “cover about a half-acre.” In 2015, Spinelli told Publishers Weekly that one key component of that inspiration was the 1964 Martha and the Vandellas song “ Dancing in the Streets,” which Spinelli said he loved first as a catchy pop number and then as a “vision of how things could be.” 2. Maniac Magee was partially inspired by a Motown song. Thirty years after it sprinted up the bestseller list and earned kidlit’s most prestigious honor, here are seven things you might not know about Maniac Magee. By 2015, the book had sold 3.3 million copies-and that was before Little, Brown released a spruced-up 25 th anniversary edition featuring an introduction by The One and Only Ivan author Katherine Applegate. Maniac Magee was published to broad acclaim in 1990, and in 1991 it was awarded the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal, an honor reserved for “the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” each year.ĭecades later, Maniac Magee is a beloved modern classic and a fixture on school reading lists. It wasn’t until the publisher’s marketing director read the book on a flight to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair that Little, Brown Books for Young Readers realized it had a potential hit on its hands. When children’s author Jerry Spinelli first handed in the manuscript for his sixth novel, about a big-hearted, athletically gifted orphan known as “Maniac” Magee, he didn’t think he was onto anything special. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |