According to historian and teacher Christopher Collier, when he initially asked his older brother James to write a historical novel with him, his older sibling was reluctant. "I thought it would be great to teach history through novels," Christopher told Allen Raymond for Teaching K-8. But he told AAYA that his brother said he "was too busy with other things." James, on the other hand, wrote to AAYA that he "does not remember being as reluctant to undertake historical fiction as Christopher suggests. When Kit [Christopher] broached the idea underlying My Brother Sam Is Dead, I quickly saw the possibilities in it. At the time publishers believed that historical fiction for children did not sell well, but fortunately we had a sympathetic editor in Judith Whipple, who wanted to do the book." However the brothers first came to agree on writing historical fiction together, the immediate results quickly...