Jake Drake, Bully Buster

Andrew Clements was born in 1949 in Camden, New Jersey. On his website, Clements shares fond childhood memories of spending summers at his family’s cabin in Maine, without television, phone, or the internet. He had plenty of time for reading, fishing, swimming, and generally “[messing] around outside,” and he is sure that “those quiet summers helped [him] begin to think like a writer” (“About Andrew.” Andrew Clements, 2025). When Clements was ready for college, he decided to study literature and then education. He taught elementary, middle, and high school before leaving the field to take a job in publishing. It was when he began a second job in the publishing industry—working for an importer of European children’s books—that he was inspired to write his own first book. This was 1985’s Bird Adalbert, a picture book about a bird who becomes conceited after he suddenly becomes very beautiful. After a few more picture books, such as Big Al and Temple Cat, Clements began writing for school-aged readers, as well. His first books for school-aged readers were part of the Watch-Me-Read series for beginning readers. These included both fiction and nonfiction—a nonfiction book about the first African-American rodeo star, Bill Pickett, for instance, and a fictional story called Karen’s Island.

Clements got the idea for his first middle-grades novel in an unusual way. In 1990, he was invited to speak about writing to children at Middletown, Rhode Island’s JFK Elementary School. The students questioned his claim that anyone can make up a word that ends up in the dictionary. As he tried to explain how this is possible, Clements gave an example: Imagine, he told them, that someone decided to stop using the word “pen” and start using the word “frindle” instead. If this person used the new word in a variety of places, a few people in each place might also start using the word “frindle”—and it could spread and spread, eventually becoming common enough to be put into the dictionary. Clements liked this idea so much that he decided to turn it into a book—Frindle, the story of fifth-grader Nicholas Allan’s quest to create a new word. Frindle was published in 1996 and became so popular that Clements was able to launch a career as a full-time author. Frindle is Clements’s best-known and most-honored book, earning him numerous awards and nominations.

Before his death in 2019, Andrew Clements wrote many more books—for a total of 82 titles in his lifetime. In addition to the Jake Drake series, he published several other series, such as the four books in his Pets to the Rescue series, and the five books in the Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School series. Clements wrote one series for young adult audiences, the Things Not Seen series, the first of which is Things Not Seen (2002). Clements also wrote many stand-alone titles, including books like The Landry News (1999), The Jacket (2001), and A Week in the Woods (2002). His many books earned him dozens of awards and award nominations, including an Edgar Award in 2007, the ALA Schneider Family Book Award in 2004, and the ALA/YALSA Best Book For Young Adults in 2002.