First Words: Earliest Writings from Favorite Contemporary Authors

Most kids write stories. Only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. But before there was Carrie, there was "Jhonathan and the Witchs." And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota Dealer, there was Manuel Citarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia?
Editor Paul Mandelbaum asked scores of authors if they - or their mothers - had saved anything they had written as children or adolescents. Forty-two writers went to their attics and dug up all manner of manuscripts - from the eight-year-old Amy Tan's essay "What the Library Means to Me," to ten-year-old Rita Dove's poem "The Rabbit with the Droopy Ear," to Norman Mailer's action-packed adventure fantasy "The Martian Invasion," also concocted at age ten.
Each of the forty-two chapters in First Words includes a brief introduction to the author, the juvenilia with commentary by writer and editor linking the childhood and adult work, photographs of the author (then and now), and, in some cases, facsimile reproductions of the original manuscripts and drawings.
The result is a funny and surprisingly informative gathering of childhood creations by today's most celebrated writers - those who are amused by and happy to share their own early efforts.
As Paul Mandelbaum says in his introduction to the book, "We pleasantly drift in and out of the knowledge that these young writers are the same people who have come to occupy the places of greatest honor on our bookshelves. Juvenilia reminds us of often forgotten that art takes its nourishment from the common garden of human experience. And that authors are children grown up, still learning, even as they teach us."