Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar was born on March 20, 1954, in East Meadow, New York, and grew up in Tustin, California. He attended UC Berkeley, where he studied economics, and it was during his college years that he first began working with children — volunteering as a teacher’s aide at a local elementary school in exchange for course credit. The experience of working with kids ignited his passion for writing stories that would speak to them, and he began writing his first book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, during this period. He later attended Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and worked briefly as a lawyer, but writing ultimately won out over legal practice.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School (1978) and its sequels established Sachar as a master of absurdist, comic fiction for middle grade readers. The Wayside School books — set in a thirty-story school built sideways, with one classroom per floor — are beloved for their anarchic humor, their memorable eccentric characters, and their ability to find deep comic potential in the mundane miseries and triumphs of school life. The series has delighted generations of young readers with its willingness to be genuinely weird and funny without condescension.

Sachar’s career reached its zenith with Holes (1998), a novel of breathtaking structural ingenuity that interweaves three narratives across different time periods to tell the story of Stanley Yelnats, a boy sent to a juvenile detention camp in the Texas desert where inmates are forced to dig holes as a form of punishment — or, as Stanley begins to suspect, for a more sinister reason. The novel won both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, a rare double distinction that places it among the very greatest achievements in American children’s literature. Holes was adapted into a popular film in 2003 starring Sigourney Weaver and Jon Voight.

Sachar’s writing is celebrated for its structural sophistication — his novels are puzzles that reward careful reading and rereading — as well as for his compassion for underdogs and his ability to balance humor with genuine emotional depth. He writes about injustice, fate, luck, and the possibility of redemption with a lightness of touch that makes serious themes accessible without trivializing them. Louis Sachar lives in Austin, Texas, and continues to write novels that challenge and delight young readers with their ingenuity and warmth.