Louis Sachar

Biography

Louis Sachar (born 1954) worked as a teacher's aide in an elementary school while attending law school — a job he took originally for credit, then continued because he loved it. He published his first children's books (the Wayside School series) before practicing law, then gave up law to write full time. Holes took him eighteen months to write and was rejected by his first publisher. It won the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award in 1998, becoming one of the best-selling children's novels of all time. Sachar has said the book began with a simple image: boys in a hot, flat place digging holes. The rest — the three timelines, the curse, the racial history — grew organically from that image.

Louis Sachar at a glance