I spent four years with the deck plan of the doomed Titanic pinned up on my writing room wall. Still, many years later when a publisher commissioned me to write a historical novel, I knew where I’d set the high moments of the story.Īll fiction begins with research. We were still three days from docking in New York.Ī Night to Remember is a reminder that there’s more high drama in real life than in any fiction. And so I settled down in a deck chair on the biggest, fastest, grandest ship afloat to read a minute-by-minute account of how the biggest, fastest, grandest ship of its day sank on its maiden voyage. It was Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. I wandered into the ship’s library one blustery day at sea, and there was a copy of a new blockbusting bestseller. This was still the Golden Age of transatlantic ocean liners, and I was aboard the mighty Royal Mail Ship Queen Elizabeth. In the summer of 1955 I was coming back from college in England. A book I found long ago-or maybe it found me-led after years to the book in your hand, Amanda Miranda. The books we read when we’re young follow us all through life. I leaped out into the maelstrom, and the water’s first icy blow knocked me senseless and stopped my breath.

I threw a leg over the rail and balanced there, watching the strange, rolling waterfall that surged beside the ship’s hull. The Titanic, her stern standing high out of the water, was sliding into the sea. Or the great crystal chandeliers thundering down on parquet floors. It shook, and there were explosions deep within it. Over the chorus of hundreds of far-off voices crying out, I heard music again, a mournful, stately melody now that broke as I listened, notes scattered to the wind. The ship shuddered and the hiss of steam ceased. Edwards Award, the ALAN Award, and the Medallion from the University of Southern Mississippi. In addition, he has won a number of major honors for the body of his work, including the Margaret A. He is a Newbery Medal winner (for A Year Down Yonder), a Newbery Honor winner (for A Long Way from Chicago), a two-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Edgar Award winner. Peck is the first children’s book author to have received a National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York City, and spends a great deal of time traveling around the country to speaking engagements at conferences, schools, and libraries. In fact The Washington Post called him America’s best living author for young adults.” A versatile writer, he is beloved by middle-graders as well as young adults for his historical and contemporary comedies and coming-of-age novels. Richard Peck has written more than thirty novels, and in the process has become one of the country’s most highly respected writers for children.

Amanda/Miranda by Richard Peck