"I guess I kiss Altschuler and he kisses me," explains the protagonist of John Donovan's first novel. "It just happens. And when it stops we sit up and turn away from each other." As the narrator voicing these lines is a teenage boy, I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip incited controversy in 1969. Some critics asserted that a book which seemed to contain a homosexual episode was not suitable for children. Others applauded Donovan's bold treatment of adolescent sexual experimentation and his willingness to discuss tough subjects like death, divorce, and alcoholism. The writer continued to address these subjects and to compose what Jean F. Mercier of Publishers Weekly called "astonishingly innovative novels" dealing with "things which matter." By 1973, as John Rowe Townsend of the New York Times Book Review noted, Donovan had earned a reputation as a "taboo-buster."

John Donovan was born in Lynn, Massachusetts...