An Interview with Robert Cormier

Robert Cormier is the author of the two highly regarded books for adolescents, The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, and has written three novels for adults, Now and at the Hour, A Little Raw on Monday Mornings, and Take Me Where the Good Times Are. His most recent work, After the First Death, will be published by Pantheon in April. The interview took place in Pantheon's offices in New York.

GD: Why did you start to write for adolescents?

RC: Well, I didn't start writing specifically for adolescents. I was surrounded by my kids and their friends who were teenagers, and I realized that they were really leading a life that was more exciting than mine. I was going to work every day and coming back home, but for them the emotional pendulum was swinging back and forth all the time. They were getting invited to the prom, falling in love—you know those things—and even though the experiences might have been transient, they were really lacerating for them. So I began to write short stories about young people. They appeared in magazines, not as young adults' stories, but in Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, McCall's, and they were usually about a relationship between a father and a daughter or a father and a son. So the next step seemed to be do to a novel.

I didn't look for it, but what happened was, my son was a freshman in this jock boys' Catholic high school and he came home with chocolates to sell. He wanted to play football and he's an average student so he knew he had to do a lot of homework and then suddenly he also had to sell these chocolates. It reminded me of the Depression when all of us sold everything in a Catholic school—chocolates, candy, greeting cards, chances—and I thought, "How far have we come in a generation?" He's going to a Catholic prep school, we're paying tuition, and he's still selling chocolates. So we kidded around about it in the evening, you know, like families do over the dinner table. And suddenly I said, "You know, Peter, there are options available. You don't have to sell the chocolates. One option is that we can buy them—there were twenty-five boxes at a dollar apiece and I was hoping he wouldn't say 'Yeah, Fine'—or you can not sell them." And he decided that he wouldn't sell them. We figured as a family we'd take a stand.

So I wrote a letter to his headmaster to say that he wasn't doing this frivolously, that we had thought about it, that it was a free society and that his option was not to sell the chocolates. So the next day he had to bring the chocolates back. I said, "Well, you won't go on the bus with two bags. I'll take you to school." And as I let him go up the walk with the two bags I thought, "God, what am I letting him in for?" Because he was a freshman, and it was only the end of September in this very active school. I felt kind of guilty about it. And that's where the emotions came from to allow me to write about it, because I do write from the emotions. So, what happened is, he gave the letter to the headmaster, who read it and said "Fine, Peter," and nothing happened. The kids later kidded him a little bit, the way kids do, but the emotions started growing in me.

Then I started to explore the situation, you know the old crutches that we all have: "What if?" What if the headmaster hadn't been that understanding? And then, what if the chocolate sale was very important to his school? And then, what if he had peer pressure?" So I started writing about this situation, and frankly, the boy at that point was Peter, my son, and the school...