Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood

A middle grade memoir from a living literary legend, giving listeners a new perspective on the origins of Gary Paulsen's famed survival stories.

His name is synonymous with high-stakes wilderness survival stories.

Now, beloved author Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood as his own original survival story.

If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there never would have been a Hatchet.

Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his first book at age 13, he may never have become a reader.

And without his desperate teenage enlistment in the Army, he would not have discovered his true calling as a storyteller.