Robert Cormier
American young adult fiction took a darker turn in the final decades of the twentieth century, as writers began pushing back against the sanitized storytelling that had long defined books for younger readers. Robert Edmund Cormier was one of the writers working in that era, bringing a notably bleak sensibility to fiction aimed at children and adolescents.
Born on January 17, 1925, in Leominster, Massachusetts, Cormier was educated at Leominster High School and later at Fitchburg State University. He built a career working as both a journalist and a writer, producing fiction in English that earned a reputation for its deeply pessimistic outlook. That tone set his work apart from much of what surrounded it on library shelves, and it also made him a target of controversy — his novel The Chocolate War has been challenged in multiple libraries.
Cormier died on November 2, 2000, in Boston, but not before his work received formal recognition from the literary community. He was awarded the Margaret Edwards Award and the Phoenix Award, two honors that together reflect the complicated trajectory of his reputation — work that unsettled readers and institutions, yet ultimately drew sustained critical acknowledgment. Those awards stand as a concrete marker of how his career, rooted equally in journalism and fiction writing, came to be viewed by the time of his death.
Quotes by Robert Cormier
Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren’t heroes. We were only there...
They tell you to do your thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your own thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It’s a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don’t disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.
Archie believed in always doing the smart thing. Not the thing you ached to do, not the impulsive act, but the thing that would pay off later.
He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine – not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.
Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he’d always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.
I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don’t think about how old they are.
I’ve had aunts and uncles who not only haven’t read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.