Rodman Philbrick

Philbrick was born in Boston, Massachusetts but he grew up in New Hampshire. He was an avid daydreamer and writer as a child; he began writing stories around age 12 and completed a novel-length work at age 16. Though Philbrick attended the University of New Hampshire and studied English, he never finished college. As a young man, Philbrick worked for a time as a boat builder and a longshoreman, which inspired his 2004 young adult novel The Young Man and the Sea. Though he began his writing career as a mystery and suspense author for adults, his fame skyrocketed when he published Freak the Mighty, his first young adult novel, in 1993. Since then, Philbrick’s young adult novels have been his most critically and commercially successful works. He collaborated on several series for young adults with his wife, Lynn Harnett, who died in 2012. When Philbrick isn’t writing, he spends his time fishing in both Maine and Florida.