Paulsen and McClintock: So Different, So Alike

My two Spotlight Biography subjects—Barbara McClintock and Gary Paulsen—bring to mind Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach expertise in a field. Think Yo-Yo Ma and his cello, for example—there’s a guy for whom practice was a joy.

In her eighties, geneticist McClintock was still working twelve hours a day in her lab. And famed children’s writer Gary Paulsen says “I’m totally, viciously, obsessively committed to work, . . . I still work that way, completely, all the time. I just work.”

 

Barbara McClintock: Nobel Prize Geneticist

For the McClintock biography, I visited the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, across from the Liberty Bell. Imagine the experience of heading into the archives with nothing but a pencil, pad, and piece of Kleenex! Imagine holding old family photos, awards, and honorary degrees. If all seventy feet of her records, including detailed 3 x 5 cards, were put into a single file drawer, it would be two school buses long.

Before the 1950s, scientists thought that genes had set positions on chromosomes. Working solo, McClintock studied maize (Indian corn) and made the startling discovery that genes are mobile and some actually control other genes. The press dubbed them “jumping genes.” That was huge, and just one of her major discoveries that changed the world of genetics.

At Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, her research home for forty decades, I met with colleagues and others. Helpful geneticists checked to ensure that my simplification of her complex findings was clear and accurate for young readers. What fun digging out details like her favorite color to paint a picture of this charming genius: “She loved the color red. Red canisters, dish rack and drain board, bowls, dishes, and breadbox brightened her kitchen. Her sugar scoop and other utensils had bright red handles.”

In 1983, at eighty-one, she received a Nobel Prize, the first woman ever to receive an unshared Nobel in Physiology or Medicine.  A set of Nobel stamps came out celebrating discoveries in genetics. “As far as portraits go, I share honors with the fruit fly,” McClintock observed wryly.

This book took two years to write, but all that research paid off. One reviewer wrote, “This is what every good biography should be.”

 

Gary Paulsen: Adventurer and Author

Author Gary Paulsen works magic with words. His more than 200 books turn students into eager readers. Millions of copies of Hatchet have sold. This award-winning tale of a city boy trying to survive along in the wilderness after a plane crash has been translated into more than fifteen languages.

For this biography, I read as many Paulsen books as I could get my hands on. The tone varies widely. Some are laugh-aloud funny. Some, particularly his Civil War books, are so poignant, they bring tears. His range is wide. Picture books are beautifully illustrated by his wife Ruth Wright Paulsen. His adventure books are designed to pull readers in, to “thoughty” (my mum’s word) young adult books for which he was honored with a Margaret A. Edwards Award. His adult Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass, is an elegy to farm life—my book group gave it a ten!

From childhood on, Paulsen’s mind worked like a recorder, storing away things he saw, heard, and felt. And he remembered. Deep in his mind, he tucked away details. There were the hard parts—his rough home life with alcoholic parents, bullies who taunted him, and school troubles. There were the good parts—kind adults, amazing adventures, a growing love of nature. And dogs—a lifetime of dogs that became his friends.

Can you imagine running a dogsled solo in the wilderness for even a day? Paulsen has run the Iditarod, the grueling 1,049-mile Alaskan dogsled race two times. If he’s thrown a stick at a bear, nearly drowned in an icy pond, survived a violent Pacific storm in a twenty-two foot sailboat, been hit by a seagull while riding a Harley, broken bones, gotten lost in a snowstorm, been blown off a mountain, chased by a moose, or caught in a flash flood, Gary Paulsen has written about it, opening the doors to books and reading to millions.

Although their fields are wildly different, both McClintock and Paulsen demonstrate how taking joy in one’s work can move the world forward in remarkable ways. I’m glad to have these two books available to young readers as ebooks through eFrog Press.