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Mary Downing Hahn is an award-winning American author of young adult novels. Her first published book, The Sara Summer, was released in 1979, when she was forty-one years old. Since then she has written over twenty novels. Many of those novels take place in Maryland, a state in which she grew up and in which she still lives.
Mary Downing Hahn speaking
I grew up in a small shingled house down at the end of Guilford Road in College Park, Maryland. Our block was loaded with kids my age. We spent hours outdoors playing "Kick the Can" and "Mother, May I" as well as cowboy and outlaw games that usually ended in quarrels about who shot whom. In the summer, we went on day long expeditions into forbidden territory—the woods on the other side of the train tracks, the creek that wound its way through College Park, and the experimental farm run by the University of Maryland.
In elementary school, I was known as the class artist. I loved to read and draw but I hated writing reports. Requirements such as outlines, perfect penmanship, and following directions killed my interest in putting words on paper. All those facts—who cared what the principal products of Chile were? To me, writing reports was almost as boring as math.
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