Robert Cormier; Author Gave Dark Touch to Juvenile Fiction

Robert Cormier grew up in a small Massachusetts town where he was chased by dogs and terrorized by bullies. Much later he drew on the dark places in his life to create fiction for young adults that was groundbreaking in its unsparing realism.

The death of the acclaimed author of “The Chocolate War” and “I Am the Cheese” on Nov. 2 in Boston brought sadness to a legion of admirers, who said Cormier’s defiance of the formula happy endings for juvenile fiction set a new tone for an entire field. Cormier, who died of complications from a blood clot, was 75.

“Everyone is . . . deeply grateful to him for single-handedly having transformed young adult literature,” said Michael Cart, president of the Young Adult Library Services Assn. “He is the single most important writer in the history of young adult fiction.”

There were no happy endings in Cormier’s world, an approach that helped make his best-known book, “The Chocolate War,” a modern classic as well as a favorite target over the last decade of campaigns to ban certain books.

He wrote of mental illness, promiscuity, suicide and murder. His young protagonists are bullied and bloodied in grim struggles for identity and moral ground that purposely evade tidy, upbeat endings.

“The reason he was so groundbreaking was he dared to be honest about darkness, about unhappiness, about obstacles that exist in life,” said Patricia J. Campbell, who is at work on her second book about Cormier’s life and art.

Although he was often criticized by adults for his unrelenting bleakness, he generally heard praise from his adolescent readers, thousands of whom called him over the years at his home in Leominster, Mass., after discovering that the phone number of a character in “I Am the Cheese” was actually his.

That they were not his intended audience when he began to write 40 years ago may explain the success of his best-selling books.

“I’ve aimed for the intelligent reader and have often found,” Cormier once said, “that that reader is 14 years old.”

Cormier grew up in a working-class, French Canadian section of Leominster. One of eight children, he was haunted by early experiences with death. A brother died of pneumonia at the age of 3, a cousin who was afraid of being buried alive also died young, and a friend was killed in a fall from a cliff.

The town library became his refuge. One of the greatest thrills of his young life, he said, was “graduating from the childhood section to the adult section.” His love of language was confirmed in seventh grade when he heard his favorite teacher’s reaction to a poem he had scribbled on a scrap of paper: “Why, Robert, you’re a writer.”

Many years later, he mused that of all his characters, he was most like Adam, the protagonist of “I Am the Cheese,” whose world crumbles along with the false identity provided to him through a government witness protection program.

“It shows what a wreck I was,” Cormier told an interviewer. “Like Adam, I had a paper route and I was chased by thousands of dogs. I was intimidated by bullies and I was scared of my own shadow. It became very personal.”

Frail even as a young man, Cormier was rejected for military service in World War II. In 1943, he entered Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts, where an art teacher helped him sell one of his stories to a national Catholic magazine--his first publication. After college and a short stint as a writer of radio commercials, he became a Massachusetts newspaperman, an occupation that he clearly viewed as his day job.

From 1946 to 1978, he was a reporter or editor for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and the Fitchburg Sentinel. By the early 1960s, he had written three adult novels.

His fourth novel, “The Chocolate War,” was also intended for a mature audience. It was inspired by the experience of his son, Peter, who with Cormier’s approval refused to participate in his high school’s candy sale.

“He was the only kid in the place who didn’t sell the chocolates,” Cormier once told an interviewer. “Nothing happened to him but something happened to me. I used the thing all writers use: ‘What if?’ What if there had been peer pressure? What if there had been faculty pressure? The emotional content was there.

“When Peter brought those chocolates back the next day, I was apprehensive for him. . . . He was 14 years old, a freshman in a new school, in a different city--these emotions got me to the typewriter.”

The result was a deeply troubling story about Jerry Renault, a boy in a Catholic high school whose refusal to sell chocolates for the annual fund-raiser places him squarely in the path of the campus bully and the corrupt priest who runs the school. What disturbed many adults was that the protagonist in this tale of individual versus society ultimately gives up his fight. “Don’t disturb the universe,” Jerry, weak after a savage beating, advises his best friend.

“The Chocolate War” was rejected by several major publishers before it was finally accepted by Pantheon--and only after Cormier reluctantly took his agent’s advice to offer it for the audience of young adults.

It caused a sensation, shattering the formula for young adult fiction that was popular through the 1960s and ‘70s: sugary tales of romance, sports, animals and cars, always with a cheery ending. “A tour de force, and a tour de force of realism,” Peter Hunt wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. “Surely the most uncompromising novel ever directed to the ’12 and up’ reader--and very likely the most necessary,” Richard Peck wrote in the journal American Libraries.

The book became a staple of the junior and senior high curriculum. Its language and sexual content also made it a top target of school and library censors. “The Chocolate War” is No. 4 on the American Library Assn.’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the past decade, just ahead of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Reaction to the book was so intense at a Florida school about 10 years ago that it sparked death threats against a teacher and an attempted car bombing.

Cormier’s subsequent books were no less disturbing. “I Am the Cheese,” published in 1977, tells the story of a boy who is the innocent victim of a government conspiracy and is crushed by the corruption around him. “After the First Death,” published in 1979, focused on a terrorist hijacking of a busload of schoolchildren in another tale of psychological suspense. “We All Fall Down,” published in 1991, examined good and evil from the perspective of a group of teenagers who vandalize a suburban home and accost a young girl.

The most recent of his 12 novels for young adults, “Frenchtown Summer,” explored the sexual awakening of a boy during a Depression-era summer. Written as a series of first-person prose poems, it won a Los Angeles Times book award this year.

Cormier rarely heard from adolescent readers who disapproved of his unflinching takes on life. “They might say to me, ‘Gee, I wish Jerry Renault . . . hadn’t lost in the end,’ ” he once told the New York Times, “but they’re not upset about the world I portray because they’re in that world every day and they know it’s war, psychological war. I seldom get a young person taking me to task for being too brutal.”

Cormier kept a busy schedule up until his death, speaking at schools and conferences and encouraging other writers. “He was a very beautiful soul,” Campbell said. “He gave himself away with both hands.”

He wrote every day on the same battered typewriter he used as a reporter for the Fitchburg paper. He had finished the manuscript for his 13th novel when he died. Craig Virden, president of Random House Children’s Books, said he has not seen it but that it is his “fervent wish” to publish it posthumously.

Cormier told Campbell recently that he was weary of the attacks on his books, particularly “The Chocolate War.” Just a few months before his death, he was defending the book in Lancaster, Mass., where parents were trying to banish it from the local middle school reading list.

He found affirmation, however, in the censors’ barbs.

“I’m not writing to make people feel good,” he once said, “and I think indifference would be the worst of all.”