The One and Only Ivan Study Guide

As a young child, Katherine Applegate didn’t like to read or write—it wasn’t until she discovered E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web that she realized reading wasn’t boring. From that point on, she wrote prolifically into adulthood. She began her professional writing career as a ghostwriter for the Sweet Valley Twins series. Applegate often collaborates with her husband, author Michael Grant, on book series for children, such as the Animorphs and Everworld series. The couple has two daughters. Though Animorphs catapulted Applegate to fame, The One and Only Ivan is her most critically acclaimed novel. It won the Newbery Medal in 2013. In addition to writing middle-grade novels, Applegate has also written a number of picture books for younger readers. Applegate lives with her family—including a variety of pets—in Irvine, California.

The One and Only Ivan is based on a true story. Ivan the gorilla was around two years old when he and a female infant gorilla were captured in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1964. The female died in transit to the United States or shortly after arriving in the country, but the owner of the B&I department store in Tacoma, Washington purchased Ivan. For three years, Ivan lived like a child in his owner’s home—but when he became too large and rambunctious, he was moved to a 14x14-foot enclosure in the B&I strip mall. He spent the next 23 years of his life there. In the late 1980s, the animal welfare group PAWS began to agitate for Ivan to be moved to a more naturalistic environment. Facing financial troubles, Ivan’s owners allowed Ivan to move to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, which then sent Ivan to Zoo Atlanta in 1994 on permanent loan. Zoo Atlanta has one of the best programs for western lowland gorillas like Ivan and, by 1994, they’d already rehabilitated another gorilla, Willie B., who had grown up and spent most of his adult life in circumstances similar to Ivan’s. Ivan lived out the rest of his life at Zoo Atlanta and died at age 50 in 2012. The protests to move Ivan stemmed from a growing movement to house captive wild animals in larger, more naturalistic settings—the kind of enclosures that, today, are common at zoos. With Ruby and Stella’s addition to the story, Applegate also draws in the growing backlash against using wild animals in circuses. The largest and most famous circus in the United States, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, retired its elephants from shows in 2015 and ended up shutting down altogether in 2017. Today, a patchwork of state and local laws exist in the United States banning the use of wild animals in circuses.

Applegate followed up The One and Only Ivan with a sequel, The One and Only Bob, in 2020. In it, Ivan’s dog friend Bob goes in search of his long-lost sister with Ivan and Ruby’s help. On her website, Applegate lists E.B. White’s novel Charlotte’s Web as the book that sparked her love of reading and writing, and its focus on kindness and helping others also appears in Ivan. Ivan is one of many novels, particularly for young readers, that draws attention to animal abuse and features an animal narrator. The most famous (and one of the earliest) examples is perhaps Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty, in which a horse narrates his life story and his experiences with various owners—some kind, some cruel. Eliot Schrefer’s four young adult novels about humans and primates (Endangered, Threatened, Rescued, and Orphaned) looks at issues facing apes—such as poaching and the destruction of their habitats—from a human perspective. In addition, the memoirs of both Dian Fossey (Gorillas in the Mist) and Jane Goodall (In the Shadow of Man and My Life With the Chimpanzees) were major forces in ape and primate research that led to the push to move the real-life Ivan out of the mall and into a zoo. Gerald Durrell also contributed to this research and pushed more broadly for captive animals to be housed in more naturalistic settings. He wrote a trio of books—My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts, and Relatives; and The Garden of the Gods—to raise money for his own zoo in Jersey.