Morton Rhue
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Todd Strasser (born May 5, 1950 in New York, New York) is an American author of more than 120 young-adult and middle grade novels and novelizations written under the pen name Morton Rhue.
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[edit] Biography
During college Strasser studied literature, after that he earned his living partly as street musician in Europe. Later he worked as a journalist as well as a writer for advertising and television. For a dozen years operated his own fortune cookie company, which produced cookies under the brand name Dr. Wing Tip Shoo. He is the father of two children, and an avid tennis player and surfer.
Strasser has written many award-winning novels for young adults, picking controversial themes like Nazism, bullying at schools and homelessness. His works includes Give A Boy A Gun, Boot Camp, Asphalt Tribe and his most famous work The Wave, a novelization of a social experiment which happened in Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California during 1969. This book was made into a movie in 1984. The book has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is read in schools around the world.
Strasser is also the author of the Time Zone High trilogy, How I Changed My Life, How I Created My Perfect Prom Date, and How I Spent My Last Night on Earth. How I Created My Perfect Prom Date was adapted for the feature film Drive Me Crazy starring Adrian Grenier and Melissa Joan Hart.
Other novels for young adults include The Accident which became the television movie Over the Limit, as well as Angel Dust Blues, Friends Till The End, and A Very Touchy Subject, which became the television movie Can A Guy Say No?
Strasser has also written a number of young adult series, including Impact Zone about surfing, Drift X about drift car competitions, Here Comes Heavenly about a punk nanny with magical powers.
His books for middle-graders include CON-fidence, The Diving Bell, and Abe Lincoln for Class President. His series for middle graders include the very popular 17-book Help! I'm Trapped... collection, as well as the Don't Get Caught, Against the Odds, and Camp Run-A-Muck books.
Strasser has also published articles and short stories in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times.
[edit] Asphalt Tribe
Asphalt Tribe is about a group of street children in New York. The children have to struggle to get enough food, to find a place to sleep, not to freeze, in short: to survive. Many young adult readers of the book were impressed after the lecture. They stressed its realistic descriptions. Many young people talk about the harsh reality of urchins which is revealed to them in this book, but is normally a unknown social reality.
[edit] Boot Camp
In the book Boot Camp which was published in Germany in 2006, reformatories for children and young adults who have behavioural problems are depicted. There atrocities and humilations belong to the daily living of the young children and adults. By this way the young children and adults should learn to be obedient.
[edit] Give a Boy a Gun
The book Give a Boy a Gun was written as a series of interviews from Middletown High School, was a recent location of a school shooting. Teachers, friends, and students give their versions of their time with Brendan and Gary, the two perpetrators of the shooting, from the beginning ninth and tenth grades, and the day of the attack. It was recently adapted into a play by Elena M. Garcia.
[edit] Works
- The Wave. Puffin Books 1988, ISBN 0-14-037188-5
- Give a Boy a Gun. Simon Pulse 2002, ISBN 0-689-84893-5
- Can't Get There from Here, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-689-84169-8
- Slide or Die. Simon Pulse 2006, ISBN 1-4169-0581-2 Drift X Series
- Battle Drift
- Sidewayz Glory
