France. After returning to the U.S., he attended Rollins College in Winter Park,

R

obert Newton Peck was born on February 17, 1928, in a rural Shaker community in Vermont. He has been a farmer, a lumberjack, a hog butcher, and a paper mill worker. From 1945 to 1947 he served in the army and was stationed in Italy, Germany, and Florida, and received his bachelor's degree in 1953. He married Dorothy Houston, a librarian, in 1958. The Pecks have two children.

Peck's first book, A Day No Pigs Would Die, launched his prolific writing career.

The book is based on Peck's own boyhood in rural Vermont and his relationship with his father. In 1973, he published Path of Hunters, about animal life in a meadow, and Millie's Boy, another novel about a boy and his father. Peck says he writes for no certain age level, and most of his...