Jack Gantos

In the historic town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, twelve-year-old Jack Gantos spends the summer of 1962 grounded for various offenses until he is assigned to help an elderly neighbor with a most unusual chore involving the newly dead, molten wax, twisted promises, Girl Scout cookies, underage driving, lessons from history, typewriting, and countless bloody noses.

"Fourteen-year-old Jack falls under the spell of a delinquent Florida neighbor and gets way more trouble than he bargained for"--

Joey tries to keep his life from degenerating into total chaos when his mother sends him to be home-schooled with a hostile blind girl, his divorced parents cannot stop fighting, and his grandmother is dying of emphysema.

Jack Henry has moved to the island of Barbados with his offbeat family and his secret diary. But still, he can't escape his penchant for wacky misadventure. Because of a headless chicken, he gets a violent case of blood poisoning. In a pepper-eating contest with his father, he discovers the perils of male bonding. And then, he has his heartstrings twanged by an older woman who just happens to be his sister's best friend. These are just a few of...

In Jack on the Tracks, fifth-grader Jack Henry is hoping for fresh adventure when he moves to a new home in Miami with his family, but he can't escape his old worrying ways. He worries about being fascinated with all things gross and disgusting. He worries about his crazy French-obsessed schoolteacher. And, most of all he worries about worrying so much. In this cycle of interrelated stories, there may be light at the end of the tunnel, if only Jack...

Becoming a writer the hard way In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. For his part in the conspiracy, Gantos was sentenced...

When sixteen-year-old Walker gets caught up in a witch-hunt against homosexuals, he is left to stand by and watch as a tragedy unfolds.

Rotten Ralph's owner, Sarah, is fed up with her red rascal's behavior. Ralph is tired of Sarah trying to change him. He misses his cat family, which never made him alter a thing about himself. But in this gag-and guffaw-filled adventure for newly independent readers, the world's favorite rotten red cat gets tripped up when he runs away for a journey down memory lane.

In this first in a series of Rotten Ralph readers, Jack Gantos reads his tale of the irrepressible cat with a penchant for disaster. When Ralph tries to help Sarah with her class project on ancient Egypt, he wreaks havoc first at the library and then continues his "assistance" at home. As usual, Ralph overcomes his rotten-ness and ultimately rescues Sarah's project by dressing up as the Sphinx. In Practice makes Perfect for Rotten Ralph, when the...

Jack Gantos' rocket-paced follow-up to the Newbery Medal-winning novel Dead End in Norvelt opens in the 1960s, deep in the shadow of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis. But instead of Russian warheads, other kinds of trouble are raining down on young Jack Gantos and his utopian town of Norvelt in western Pennsylvania. After an explosion, a new crime by an old murderer, and the sad passing of the town's founder, twelve-year-old Jack will soon...