Jeanne DuPrau Biography
Jeanne DuPrau has written several books of nonfiction for children and adults and four books to date in the City of Ember series. She has been a teacher, an editor, and a technical writer. She lives in Menlo Park, California, where she keeps a big garden and a small dog.
"When did you
decide to be a writer?" people often ask me. Well, it was like this:
At about age 6, I wrote my first book, or at least the first book of mine that
survives to the present day. It's called "Frosty the Snowman." It's five pages
long, illustrated with red and green crayon, and bound with loops of yarn.
My next extant work dates, I think, from the seventh grade. It's a collection of
stories handwritten on lined newsprint. One is about a merry-go-round that
mysteriously flies off into the air. Another is about a girl who mysteriously
disappears while ice skating. A third is about a seashell that mysteriously
opens a door to an underwater world. It's not hard to deduce that mysterious
happenings were what I loved best at the time–a wardrobe door leading to Narnia,
a rabbit hole leading to Wonderland, a nanny who flew away when the wind
changed.
A year or two later, I started reading Dickens. I loved the world of Dickens's
novels, full of colorful characters and wildly complicated plots. I decided to
write Dickensian stories myself. To prepare for this, I put together notebooks
with headings on each page for character names, settings, plot ideas, and
beginning sentences. I wrote pages and pages of great names (Ophelia
Gordonswaithe, Hester Hollyhock), lists of settings (an insane asylum, a
deserted railway station), and beginning sentences ("A sharp laugh broke the
heavy silence"). I didn't actually write very many stories, though. I think I
wrote three or four, but only one of them went all the way to the end. The rest
petered out after a couple of pages–or a couple of paragraphs.
But I kept at it. All through school, I wrote and wrote. Some of this writing my
teachers assigned–book reports, college essays, my senior thesis. Some I
assigned myself – stories, poems, journals, letters. After I graduated from
college (an English major, of course), I did several different kinds of work,
but they all involved writing and reading in one way or another. I taught high
school English (and started a creative writing club for my students). I worked
as an editor in educational publishing companies (and wrote stories for reading
textbooks). I worked for a computer company (and wrote about how to use
computers).
At the same time, after work, on weekends, whenever I could fit it in, I was
doing my own writing. I wrote about people I knew, experiences I'd had, books
I'd read, ideas that had occurred to me. I started sending these pieces of
writing out into the world, and quite often they were published. I wrote a book,
and then another book. The more I wrote, the more things I thought of to write
about.
So the answer to the question, "When did you decide to be a writer?" is: Never.
I never decided anything – I just wrote and kept on writing, because writing was
what I liked to do. What could be more interesting than thinking of mysterious
happenings, finding the answers to intriguing questions, and making up new
worlds? Writers have a great job. I'm glad to be one.
This biography was last updated on 04/01/2010.
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