Although Many unique and strange things happen in the book, Dead End in Norvelt, it was actually a true story written by a real person. His name was indeed Jack Gantos and he grew up to be a writer. What the story doesn't explain though, is the fact that his life wasn't as simple as it seemed in the book. His first time to realize that he enjoyed literature was when he was six. His sister left her diary open and Jack found out that he could read better than his sister could. After this, he asked his mother for a diary and began to jot down conversations that he heard around him, mostly from teahers, which he later turned into stories (About Jack Gantos). When he was seven, he moved to Barbados, where his early acedemics in writing flourished. The classes in the British schools were competitive, but the teachers like their job and made it fun for Jack to develope a liking for reading. He then moved to south Florida, where he found the kids were uninterested in learning and spent most of their time disciplining students (Jack Gantos Website). He spent much of his free time reading next to a baseball field in a bookmoile park. This would later make his biggest goal to be too turn all trailer parks into book mobile parks, which would inspire a new knowledge driven generation (Jack Gantos Wiki). In the story, Jack is shown to be stuck in a very solid place (his room). He could have possibly writen this book to contrast his life, where he was constantly being moved, to a time when his biggest goal was to simply get moving around his neighborhood. It could have also been derived from the fact that his middle school was a prison and may have reminded him of being locked in his room for nearly an entire summer with nothing to do. Also, like his childhoood, he had neighbors who did many strange things that could have provoke the focal point of the book to be about a woman who wrote obituaries. In total, the story sums up Jack's life and elements into a small frame of time, where it's simpler to process the emotions of his life. From permanence to moving out of the country, Jack hand an extraordinary childhood. What better a person to encompass his life into a short novel than the expert himself.