Dan Gutman

Born October 19, 1955

Books Alive interview with Dan Gutman:  https://abookandahug.com/books-alive-with-dan-gutman/

Meet Dan Gutman:  https://dangutman.com/

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Author Biography:   https://dangutman.com/about-dan/

I was born in New York City on October 19, 1955. When I was about a year old, my family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where I spent my childhood. It was pretty uneventful until June 1, 1968, when I came home from a Little League game and found that my dad had suddenly abandoned my mom, my sister Lucy, and me. It was pretty traumatic, as you can imagine, but we all survived.

I attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, graduating in 1977 with a degree in psychology. After spending a few unhappy years in graduate school, I decided that psychology was not for me. What I really wanted to do, I decided, was to be a writer.

I wanted to write humor, like Art Buchwald and Erma Bombeck. So I moved to New York City in 1980 (where all starving writers go) and began cranking out “humorous essays.” My essays weren’t particularly funny, though I did publish some in a Staten Island newspaper, the Advance. My first check (for $15) is on the wall over my desk as I write this. I also had some of my photos published in the children’s humor magazines Cracked and Crazy.

I tried writing magazine articles, with little success. I wrote a few screenplays, but never sold them. I thought I had some good book ideas, but publishers weren’t interested. I received hundreds of rejection letters. It was very frustrating, but I was very determined and persistent. I felt that I had some ability as a writer, but I didn’t know where to direct it.

In 1982 the video game Pac-Man was a huge craze, and I started a video games magazine called Video Games Player. This was the first (and only) job I ever had. The magazine sold pretty well, and two years later it was renamed Computer Games. Most importantly, I met my future wife Nina while working on the magazine. She is an illustrator, and we hired her to draw game screens. We got married in 1983. When Computer Games went out of business in 1985, I decided to take a gamble and become a full time freelance writer. At first I wrote about computers, but gradually I started tackling other topics. Eventually, my writing creeped into EsquireNewsweekScience DigestWriter’s DigestSuccessPsychology TodayNew WomanUSA Today, and The Village Voice. I was gaining confidence as a writer, but I still hadn’t found the type of writing I really wanted to do.

In 1987, I decided to try my hand at writing about something I always loved – sports. I sold an article to Discover magazine about the science behind the spitball, scuffball, and corked bats. This led to my first adult baseball book, It Ain’t Cheatin’ If You Don’t Get Caught. It sold pretty well, and I wrote several more baseball books for adults. None of them were big sellers, but it was a lot more fun than writing about computers.

In 1992, when my son, Sam, was two years old, I decided to try writing for children. I wrote a few baseball books, then branched out to other sports – ice skating and gymnastics.—from https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/authors/dan-gutman/

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Books by Dan Gutman:    https://dangutman.com/dans-books/

Books by Dan Gutman:
houdini and me
 
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Johnny Hangtime
 
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The Talent Show
 
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Casey Back at Bat
 
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Homework Machine
 
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Getting Air
 
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