For these reasons-and so history does not repeat itself-there’s a real need for a greater sense of history in our schools.” Speaking and visiting in schools has inspired him to write historical fiction. When it didn’t impact them directly, then that was all. “This was not an attack on their peer group. While the event briefly registered with them, he doesn’t see much difference in their lives or attitudes six months later. “the only historic event that had ever happened” in the lives of his current readers. Peck calls the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. In all my novels, you have to declare your independence from your peers before you can take that first real step toward yourself.” “You only grow up when you’ve walked away from those people. But, the authority of the peer group began to replace adult authority, and children quickly learned that they dare not be better achievers than their leaders in the peer group,” he explains. The change was due to many things: the collapse of family structure, the politicization of schools. It was the second semester of the 1967-68 school year.
“When I was young, we were never more than five minutes from the nearest adult, and that solved most of the problems I write about for a later generation living nearer the edge.” In fact, he remembers the year when everything changed. Teaching had reacquainted him with the challenges of being young: “As adults, we want young people to start looking for themselves, but they only want to look for leaders.”
The year was 1971 and Peck was thirty-seven years old. Richard Peck, a Newbery Award winner and best-selling author of young adult books, wrote his first line of fiction the day he quit his junior high school teaching job.
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