Dan Gutman
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Dan Gutman (born 19 October 1955 in New York City) is an author from New Jersey. A prolific writer, with over a dozen works set to be released in 2006 alone, Gutman has written over 60 books, both fictional and non-fictional. He has had works released by such publishers as Penguin Books, Macmillan, Scholastic Press, and HarperCollins. Many of his books revolve around baseball, a sport which he has played and extensively followed throughout his life.
His writing almost exclusively consisted of non-fiction work until 1992, when he was inspired by his then-two-year-old son to start writing children's books. Perhaps his most famous works are his series of & Me novels for children, which started with his 20th published work, Honus & Me, a story that was originally rejected by at least a half-dozen publishers. Each book in the series revolves around a child travelling back in time to meet a baseball legend; the first work was based on the premise of a boy finding a Honus Wagner T206 baseball card in an attic. Further books in the series feature Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Dorothy "Mickey" Maguire (the main character, Joe Stoshack, was supposed to meet Mickey Mantle, but an accident happened and he went back to the times of the AAGPBL instead), Abner Doubleday, and Satchel Paige. The original story, Honus & Me, was made into a Turner Network Television made-for-TV picture entitled The Winning Season, starring Matthew Modine.
His other major series of children's literature is a set of sixteen books (of which five are yet to be released) entitled the My Weird School series. In addition, Gutman was also briefly a syndicated newspaper columnist and videogame magazine editor in the 1980s. He also wrote the book "The Million Dollar Shot" about a boy who gets the chance to win a million dollars by making a foul shot.
A graduate of Rutgers University, Gutman continues to live in Haddonfield, New Jersey with his wife and two children.
