Gale - A Study Guide for Paul Zindels The Pigman

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Paul Zindel

1968

Paul Zindel's first novel, The Pigman, published in New York in 1968 by Harper & Row, is a story of two dispossessed young people who find a surrogate parent in Angelo Pignati, an Italian man who has never had children and whose wife is dead. He shares his humor and joy in life with them, and in his presence, they are allowed to be carefree and childlike in a way that they can't be with their own families.

The novel is considered by many critics to be the "first truly [young adult] book," according to Teri Lesesne in an interview with Zindel in Teacher Librarian. When Zindel wrote the book, he realized that few books depicted teenagers dealing with real problems in the modern world. He also talked to many teenagers who said they hated to read or had been branded as troublemakers, and he targeted his story to them. Zindel's honesty and humor "broke new ground, and prepared the soil" for many excellent young adult books to come, according to Lesesne.

In an interview with Scholastic students, Zindel said that he was inspired to write the book while he was house-sitting in a fifty-room "castle" on Staten Island. A teenage boy trespassed on the grounds, and when Zindel went out to yell at him, he found out that the boy was actually a very interesting person. The character of John Conlan in The Pigman was modeled on this young man. The character of Lorraine was modeled on a student in one of the chemistry classes Zindel taught. He told the interviewer, "I thought, what a wonderful ad-venture it would be to team those two life models for me into a story in which they met an eccentric, old mentor figure."

Paul Zindel was born on May 15, 1936, in Staten Island, New York, and grew up on Staten Island with his mother and sister. His father, a police officer, abandoned the family when Zindel was very young, and Zindel rarely saw him. His mother struggled to make ends meet, and because of their poverty, the family moved often. Zindel felt like a misfit because he had no father and because the family moved so much, but later realized that this feeling of being different from others had fueled his imagination. He wrote his first play in high school, and enjoyed the praise he got from other students for his morbid sense of humor.

He attended Wagner College on Staten Island, where he studied chemistry, but also took a creative writing course with famed playwright Edward Albee, who encouraged Zindel to write more plays. He wrote his second original play during his last year of college.

After college, Zindel worked briefly as a technical writer for Allied Chemical, but he hated the job. After six months, he quit and became a high-school chemistry and physics teacher. While teaching, he continued to write plays; his first staged play was The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, loosely based on his own life. The play won several awards, including Best American Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; it was produced on Broadway; and it was made into a film and a television drama.

Charlotte Zolotow, an editor for the publisher Harper & Row, was impressed by the play and asked Zindel if he had any novels in mind. She encouraged him to write The Pigman, his first novel, which was published in 1968. The novel was selected as one of the Notable Children's Books of 19401970 by the American Library Association and was named one of their Best of the Best Books for Young Adults in 1975. It was also one of the Child Study Association of America's Children's Books of the Year in 1968, and was given the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Text in 1969. The book was inspired by two teenagers Zindel met, a young man who had many of the adventures that later appeared in the book, and a young woman who was very much like Lorraine, one of the two main characters. The Pigman, an eccentric old Italian man, was based on an Italian grandfather who was a mentor to Zindel when he was young.