by William Sleator

Born February 13, 1945, William Sleator pursued first music and then English at Harvard University. In 1974, when Sleator wrote House of Stairs, he was wavering between a career as a writer he had already had a few stories for young adults published or as a pianist for the Boston Ballet Company. House of Stairs was his fourth of more than seventeen books for this audience. The novel's main themes, a questioning of authority and an illustration of the dangers of behavior conditioning, reflect the counterculture sentiment of many young people during the early 1970s.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The science of behavior modification. Russian scientists at the turn of the twentieth century conducted research into an aspect of behavioral science known as conditioning that is, the practice of teaching a subject to behave in a certain way. The...