Biography
Richard Wayne Peck was born April 10, in Illinois to Virginia Grey Peck and Wayne Peck. His mother was a Wesleyan University graduate in economics and his father owned a service station. He has a sister, Cheryl, who is an administrator at a college in Springfield, Illinois. He attended elementary and high schools in Decatur.
Peck began his career as a high school teacher, but, much to his dismay, was transferred to a junior high school to teach English. After a while, he decided to cut his career short and write. However, these observations about junior high school students proved excellent material for his books. He said, "Ironically, it was my students who taught me to be a writer, though I was hired to teach them."
Peck studied at DePauw University, earning a bachelor's degree in English in 1956. He belonged to the Delta Chi fraternity and spent his junior year abroad at the University of Exeter. After college, he was drafted into the US Army as a chaplain's Assistant and spent two years serving in Stuttgart, Germany. In a 2003 interview he commented, "I think your view of the world goes on—for the rest of your life—as the world you saw as you emerged into it as an adult."
After his military service ended, he completed a masters degree at Southern Illinois University in 1959 and taught junior high and high school English. He left teaching in 1971 to write his first novel, Don't Look and It Won't Hurt, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1972, in which "A teenage girl struggles to understand her place within her family and in the world." He has written a book each year since then, totaling 41 books in 41 years.
Peck is a beast person "who is fastidious about what he allows others to know about himself. He knows, respects, and honors personal boundaries in ways that are refreshing for someone who grew up in the sixties and seventies, when every little personal thing was fair game." He currently lives in New York and divides his time between writing and traveling. Peck is an adjunct professor with Louisiana State University's School of Library and Information Sciences.
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“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
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