What was Gary Paulsen's childhood like?

Answer 1

It apparently was pretty unhappy. I don't know what happened to his parents but he was raised by his grandmother and aunts. He ran away from them when he was 14 to travel with a carnival, which sounds romantic, but is hard, dirty work. He came to love adventure and traveling and spent time working on a farm, had several careers and has done the Iditirod at least twice. He loved books from an early age, however, and spent much of his early childhood tucked away in the basement of the apartment where he was raised reading.