Louis Sachar is an author of books for elementary school students. As he writes, he tries to recall what it felt like for him to be that age. He thinks that children in elementary school are pretty much the same as when he was in school. He remembers a time when he had to stay away from the woods across the street. There were some tough older boys about eleven or twelve who played there and he did not want any trouble.
Sachar was born in East Meadow, New York on March 20, 1954. When he was nine years old, he moved to Tustin, California. Tustin was full of orange groves at that time and unlike his time in East Meadow, New York; he would go through the groves and have orange fights on the way home. Sachar currently lives in Austin, Texas. Sachar enjoyed school and was a good student, but it was not until high school that he really became an avid reader. He graduated from high school in 1976.
After high school, Sachar attended Antioch College in Ohio. During his first semester at Antioch, Sachar’s father died. Due to his father’s death, Sachar moved back to California to be with this mother. During that time, he got a job as a Fuller Brush. A Fuller Brush is a person who goes door-to-door selling cleaning products. He went back to college, attending the University of California at Berkeley where he majored in economics. While in college, he took a big interest in Russian literature, but after one year of classes, it was still all Greek to him. He dropped out of the class and tried to figure out what else he should do.
One day at college, an elementary student was handing out flyers and he grabbed one. The flyer read, “Help. We need teachers’ aides. Earn three units of credit.” At the time, Sachar did not have any interest in teaching, but he signed up anyway to help out at the Hillside Elementary School. At this job, he not only worked in the classroom, he also became Noontime Supervisor. The students called him “Louis the Yard Teacher.” Taking this job ended up being an important decision.
After graduating from college, he wrote the book Sideways Stories from Wayside School which was about the kids at Hillside. It took him nine months to write during the evening. During the daytime, he was working at a sweater warehouse in Connecticut. He was fired after about one year because he did not really have much interest in sweaters. That is when he decided to become a lawyer. He graduated from law school in 1980, did some part-time legal work and continued to write children’s books. While he was a lawyer, he thought some more about becoming a writer. He finally became a writer of children’s books full-time and a lawyer part-time.
In 1985 he married Carla and in 1987 they had a daughter, Sherre. In 1989, Sachar had sold enough books that he no longer practiced law. His wife, who used to be a counselor at an elementary school, was his inspiration for the book There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom. Today, Sachar writes every morning for about two hours but never speaks about his book until it is finished. His latest book Small Steps which was published in January of 2006, took him two years to write. He never mentioned the book to his wife or daughter, but they are the first to read them. Today, Sachar spends his time playing bridge tournaments in Austin and around the country.