The Best Authors for Kids

These authors all come highly recommended by the Greatess review team. Grab these books for your young readers today and enjoy them together.

Sherman Alexie's humorous, semiautobiographical novel, illustrated by Ellen Forney, follows 14-year-old Junior — poor, skinny and with a freakishly big head — as he leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation for a mostly white school in a nearby town. Alexie captures the pain and awkwardness of adolescence while also meditating on the devastation that poverty, racism and alcoholism have wreaked on Native American communities.

Soman Chainani wrote his graduate thesis on why evil women make irresistible fairy-tale villains. His first novel, The School for Good and Evil, debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List and is currently being adapted into a Universal Pictures film.

Linda Sue Park is the author of many books for young readers, including A Single Shard, winner of the 2002 Newbery Medal, and two books in "The 39 Clues" series. Her most recent novel is the New York Times bestseller A Long Walk to Water.

Margi Preus writes books for young people, including the novels Shadow on the Mountain and Heart of a Samurai, a 2011 Newbery Honor book featured by NPR's Backseat Book Club. Margi also writes plays, hikes, skis, paddles, or sits quietly with a book in her lap.

Rita Williams-Garcia is an award-winning writer of books for young readers and is known for her realistic portrayal of teens of color. Her books include Jumped, Every Time a Rainbow Dies, and One Crazy Summer, which won the Coretta Scott King award in 2011.

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The Many Boasts of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was, without a doubt, one of the most important and influential authors of the 20th century, but he was also a very boastful man. Although many are unconfirmed or simply unverifiable, here are some of the many boasts Hemingway made throughout his storied life.

He befriended a bear. In a 1950 interview published in The New Yorker, Hemingway told staff writer Lillian Ross of a somewhat special relationship he had with a bear. Ross writes: "In Montana, once, he lived with a bear, and the bear slept with him, got drunk with him, and was a close friend."

F. Scott Fitzgerald once asked Hemingway for help of an intimate nature. The Great Gatsby author was concerned about the size of… a part of his anatomy. Hemingway asked the author to follow him to the men’s room and upon inspection said (from A Moveable Feast): "'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are OK. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'"

He would finish the bar fights that James Joyce started. From Kenneth Schuyler Lynn’s book entitled Hemingway: "We would go out for a drink," Hemingway told a reporter for Time magazine in the midfifties, "and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say: 'Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!'"

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Fascinating Facts About F. Scott Fitzgerald

The author of such timeless classics as The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, F. Scott Fitzgerald has long since solidified his place in history as one of the most important and influential authors of the 20th century. Here are three fascinating facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald that you may not have known.

He was a terrible student. While Fitzgerald demonstrated a love of literature and a talent for writing at an early age, he was a terrible student, struggling to achieve passing marks both in grade school and in college. Fitzgerald nearly flunked out of Princeton, regularly cutting classes before abandoning his studies to join the military. Her was also a terrible speller, and may have suffered from dyslexia.

He nearly fought in World War I. Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant in the army after dropping out of Princeton, he was worried he would die in battle but the November 1918 armistice was signed shortly before his troupe was to be deployed.

He kept a detailed account of his life. Fitzgerald kept detailed records of his income and his published works, but also of his life, with month by month details of his activities since his birth, complete with everything from his first word to his height to falling in love.

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