Louis Sachar - Holes

In 1998, Sachar published what has become his best-known book, Holes. A darker and scarier work than his previous books, Holes tells the story of Stanley Yelnats, an adolescent who is wrongfully convicted of stealing a pair of sneakers from famous baseball player, Clyde Livingston. and sentenced to spend 18 months at Camp Green Lake, a remote boys' juvenile detention center where all the boys are forced to dig holes in an arid, dried-up lake bed. Holes sold more than five million copies and won several awards, among them the 1998 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1999 Newbery Medal, which "is the highest honor accorded to children's literature in the United States." As of 2006, Holes remains the only book to have won both awards. When Holes was made into a film in 2003, Sachar wrote the screenplay and made a cameo appearance as Mr. C a bottle of onion juice to help him grow hair.

Though Sachar followed Holes with four new installments in the Marvin Redpost book series in 1999 and 2000, and a short Holes spin-off, Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake, in 2003, the author did not publish another full-length novel in the eight years following Holes. He admitted in 2006 that "being caught up in the whirlwind of Hollywood" during the making of the film Holes was a distraction that made it hard to get back into the "mindset" of writing. During a particularly frustrating part of the film's production, Sachar said he worked for a few weeks on "a follow-up novel that had X-Ray complaining to Armpit about Hollywood ripping off their story." In 2006, he released the full-length novel Small Steps, which features some of the characters from Holes.