Gary Paulsen

After a plane crash, thirteen-year-old Brian spends fifty-four days in the Canadian wilderness, learning to survive with only the aid of a hatchet given him by his mother, and learning also to survive his parents' divorce. Includes an introduction and sidebar commentary by the author.

After having survived alone in the wilderness, Brian finds that he can no longer live in the city but must return to the place where he really belongs.

Born into the middle of World War II, Gary Paulsen's turbulent childhood provided plenty of subject matter for his bestselling novels, and the librarians in his life gave him the inspiration and support to explore the world through books. As a soldier himself, his storytelling technique developed, and for the first time he shares his own.

A teenager left on his own travels west in a kit car he built himself, and along the way picks up two Vietnam veterans, who take him on an eye-opening journey.

When sickness decimates his fishing village, an orphan named Leif flees north in a cedar canoe, journeying along a brutal but beautiful coastline.

The author relates incidents in his life and how they inspired parts of his books about the character, Brian Robeson.

A young boy growing up on a northern Minnesota farm describes the scenes around him and recounts his old Norwegian uncle's tales of an almost mythological logging past.

Huck escapes from the lonely cabin in which his drunken, brutal father had imprisoned him; on Jackson's island he meets Jim, a runaway slave. Together they float down the Mississippi River on a raft, occasionally stopping at the banks. In these brief episodes Huck participates in the lives of others, witnessing corruption, moral decay, and intellectual impoverishment. He learns from Jim of the dignity and worth of a human being.

Only thirteen, John must track a deer in the Minnesota woods for his family's winter meat, and in doing so finds himself drawn to the doe who leads him and hating his role as hunter.

During World War II, a little boy is sent to live with his grandma, a cook in a camp for workers building a road through the wilderness.