Paul Zindel

Author of punchy teenage novels such as 'The Pigman'

Paul Zindel, writer: born New York 15 May 1936; married 1973 Bonnie Hildebrand (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1998); died New York 28 March 2003

One of the first authors to aim specifically at young adult readers, Paul Zindel survived a childhood as traumatic as anything suffered by the teenagers in his many novels.

Aged two when he was abandoned by his New York policeman father, he and his older sister Betty were brought up by an Irish-American mother apt when departing the home to call out "Wish me a happy suicide!" whenever her spirits were particularly low. Working variously as a hot-dog vendor, a hat-check girl and a dog-breeder, she combined groundless optimism with a dark paranoia inevitably leading to fights with her various neighbours.

Her doings, along with other adventures the family had in Staten Island, are memorably recorded in Zindel's autobiographical fragment The Pigman and Me (1991). This describes one of the few relatively happy short stays mother and children experienced before moving off as they always did, on an average twice every year.

Good at his lessons, Zindel studied chemistry at Wagner College, New York, before working as a teacher for 10 years. But he never forgot the pleasure of having a story published at school when he was 15, coming as he did from a home with no books at all. In 1965 he wrote The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. This play about a tormented family was designed for television but later moved to Broadway, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1971.

By this time the distinguished author and editor Charlotte Zolotow had suggested that he should try writing for teenagers. The result was The Pigman (1968), one of the defining teenage novels of the Western world after the Second World War. It describes the way that two alienated adolescents first get to like and then go on to betray old Mr Pigneti, a widower living on his own who also collects china pigs – hence his nickname. But John and Lorraine, the teenagers in question who narrate this whole story, know they have done wrong, and just have time to make some amends before Mr Pigneti abruptly dies.

Punchily written, this book crackles with post-Salinger energy. For all its outspokenness it is also at times a feel-good story, from an author who believed that truth is often crueller than the sort of fiction he wanted to write. Equally successful was his next book, My Darling, My Hamburger (1969), whose title derives from the advice a teacher gives teenage Liz and Maggie about what to do when a boy gets too demanding: "Suggest going to get a hamburger." Here was a story that spoke frankly about masturbation, sexual desire and what can happen after giving in to the wrong boy for the wrong reasons.

Many other titles followed, some taken not just from Zindel's own childhood but from the lives of the high-school pupils he taught. They also helped him choose arresting titles like Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball (1976), a novel about two isolated teenagers from dysfunctional families who fall in love and at last experience some happiness.

This mixture of the tough and tender is typical of Zindel, clearly separating his work from the darker teenage stories written by his contemporary Robert Cormier. Even so, his novels continued to explore potentially painful subjects, albeit with some sort of resolution always on hand in the last few pages. Drawing on the experience of 18 months' convalescence from tuberculosis during his own adolescence in Harry and Hortense at Hormone High (1984), writing about feelings of general worthlessness in The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman (1987), he was never afraid to describe the various causes that had made his own young life seem so "drab, loveless and desperate". Writing Confessions of a Teenage Baboon (1977) almost led to a nervous breakdown, so close was the material to his own unhappiness when young.

But in his later years as a successful novelist, married with two children, he also wrote in answer to a fan's questions that he ultimately believed that good wins over evil, that there is some sense to the universe and that it is glorious to be young and involved in the great adventure of life. Such optimism is enshrined in the character of Nonno Frankie, the wise and sweet-natured Italian grandfather beautifully described in The Pigman and Me, who made Zindel's own life as a child briefly so much more tolerable.

Writing particularly and prolifically for the many children like himself with no previous experience of enjoyment in reading, Zindel was an astonishingly effective communicator, with sales in the millions plus numbers of literary awards.

Nicholas Tucker