Cormier, Robert Edmund

▪ 2001

      American children's writer (b. Jan. 17, 1925, Leominster, Mass.—d. Nov. 2, 2000, Boston, Mass.), was an award-winning journalist for the Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel before making his name as one of the first writers to explore the darker realms of teenage life in such works as The Chocolate War (1974), the controversial story about the abuse heaped on a Roman Catholic schoolchild who refuses to sell chocolate bars; I Am the Cheese (1977), a look at the torturous imprisonment and psychiatric examination of a youth; and The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (1983), a morbid view of terminally ill children in an experimental hospital. His last work, Frenchtown Summer (1999), was an unexpectedly warmhearted story about the relationship between a father and son.

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