Gary Paulsen

You know him, or at least you should if you had any kind of intelligent, cultured childhood, as the author of Hatchet. It's an awesome young-kid-surviving-the-wiles-of-nature-novel. That My side of the Mountain book can suck a fat dick.

Wiki describes his writing as being 'mostly known as coming of age stories about the wilderness'.

The Hatchet series and his crazy historical fiction novel Canyons are hands-down some of the finest books written for young adults ever.

I read an excerpt from Canyons about a Native American boy being shot point blank in the forehead aloud to my fifth grade class because I fucking love it and also I like to be edgy. Look, you can see the bullet hole rith in the cover picture!

The Beet Fields has a fairly graphic sex scene between a sixteen year old and a stripper? prostitute? that may have been the first erotica I've read. Maybe.

And his autobiography, Eastern Sun, Winter Moon is just fucking nuts. A scene of him losing his dog when he lived in the Phillapines with literally haunt me for my entire life.

He's written so much. For real, check the list on Wiki- such a huge writing career. Even a science fiction or two, such as The Transall Saga which I hated being assigned in middle school until I realized he was the one who wrote it.

He also wrote approximately one million books about sled dogs.

Look at him. What a wholesome, awesome dude with an endearing passion for huskies and excellent knowledge of honest-to-goodness survival skills.

I kind of wish he was my uncle or something. Obsessed.