Once upon a lifetime ago, I taught junior high English. Among my many challenges: trying to encourage 12- and 13-year-old students to sit still long enough to read a book. Talk about tilting at windmills. Nevertheless, author Theodore Taylor’s book, THE CAY (required reading back then) almost invariably captured their interest.
Taylor, an exemplar for today’s YA writers, died this week. Here, a few excerpts from his obituary:
ON FINDING INSPIRATION: “The writing usually began with a haunting, a real-life incident so arresting that author Theodore Taylor could not shake it from his mind. At the typewriter he used that unforgettable event as a cornerstone, the foundation of a world created on the page.”
ON CHARACTERIZATION: “The fiction that resulted rang so true that for decades young readers sent Taylor letters inquiring about his characters, most often those of his novel “The Cay”: a bigoted boy named Phillip stranded on an island during World War II with Timothy, a compassionate black man upon whom the boy’s life depends.”
ON HIS AUDIENCE: “Above all I try not to ‘write down’ to the young reader,” he once said.
ON WRITING: “I’ll get into a novel knowing something about the beginning, knowing less about the middle and knowing nothing about the end,” he told a Times reporter in 1997. “I don’t want to know anything about the end until I get there, and I hope I’ll be able to recognize the end when I get there.”
HIS LEGACY: “Even this week, as Taylor lay dying, mail arrived from young readers of that 1969 novel, a now classic work that helped set the standard for young-adult literature.”
If you haven’t yet treated yourself to anything written by Taylor, I adding THE CAY to your own list of required reading.
What a lovely tribute. Thanks for posting it.
I still see middle schoolers of all ages reading THE CAY. And that’s not for required reading. It’s for reading of their own choice, albeit they probably just chose a book off the teacher’s shelf. If that’s the case, “Good Teacher” for having books like that available.
I still see middle schoolers of all ages reading THE CAY. And that’s not for required reading. It’s for reading of their own choice, albeit they probably just chose a book off the teacher’s shelf. If that’s the case, “Good Teacher” for having books like that available.
I have never read The Cay, but I distinctly remember it because my bf in elementary school HATED to read–we even got in trouble in third grade because we did a book project together and it was obvious that I was the only one who had read the book. Her mother was always trying to get me to help her ‘discover’ books. I’m not sure who put The Cay in her hands, but I remember her raving about how much she loved it.
Had not heard this news, Melodye. Thank you for letting us know. :{ I somehow managed to get to this point in my life -knowing- about the book, but never reading THE CAY. I know what I am going to look for tonight if we can leave the house and hit a bookstore. The snippets from his obituary are inspiring and made me feel sad to not have known much about this author.
The weather here today has been a zoo. I feel bad. I wanted to go see E. Lockhart at a B & N about 30 minutes away but we were in the midst of quite the nasty rain and wind storm.
{} as always
Would you believe that I’ve never heard of thisd book? It wasn’t required reading in England, but it sounds great and I’ll be sure to get a copy soon.
wow
thank you for sharing that!
That book made a HUGE impression on me. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Krafick, read it out loud to us every afternoon. I loved the writing. When we were finished listening to it, I borrowed it and read it again.
What a special man.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I loved THE CAY from way back when in elementary school and enjoyed reading it with my students when I was teaching.