Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

Author Gary James Paulsen often claimed that his life inspired the fiction he created. His childhood was tumultuous; he was a poor student and he struggled to fit in, eventually finding solace and identity in nature. The peace that he found in the wild stayed with him throughout his life and formed the basis for his middle-grade and young adult novels.

Guts is a memoir in first-person perspective offering thematic anecdotes from Paulsen’s life that are directly linked to his famous Hatchet series, a middle-grade collection of coming-of-age wilderness adventure novels.

Born into an era of war in 1939, Paulsen spent the first seven years of his life without his father, who was a deployed military officer. His mother worked in a munitions plant in Chicago, leaving Paulsen with his grandmother. When the war ended, Paulsen and his mother traveled by boat to the Philippines. Many of the events that transpired during the harrowing voyage East were recounted in Eastern Sun, Winter Moon: An Autobiographical Odyssey.

In 1949, the Paulsen family returned to Minnesota. Many of the experiences in Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books hail from this period of nature exploration and a growing interest in hunting. However, Paulsen was deeply unhappy as his parents drank heavily and argued often. He found himself escaping the turmoil at home for the wild. He did not fit in at school and skipped frequently. After graduating from high school, Paulsen briefly attended a university, which he paid for with funds he earned from his trapping days, before dropping out and enlisting in the military. He served for four years before being honorably discharged and moving to California where he briefly took flying lessons before quitting to focus on his work and family. Paulsen was married three times, the first two ending in divorce. The final marriage, which began in the 1960s, lasted until his death. He completed the Iditarod in 1983, which formed the basis for his first novel, Dogsong. He quit the races in 1986 and 2006, citing declining health in the latter instance. Paulsen worked as a volunteer ambulance driver while writing from home, which gave him further fodder for his adventure and survival-themed books.

Paulsen died at home of a heart attack at age 81 in 2021, having completed over 200 books and many short stories in his lifetime. He was a prolific writer, producing a vast body of work. He was the 1997 winner of the Margaret Edwards Award, and his novels earned praise individually, including several nominations for the Newbery Medal.

Paulsen’s work demonstrates the author’s deep affection for nature and the natural world. Through his fictional characters and in his autobiographical works, Paulsen attempts to show the life-altering benefits of time spent alone in nature. His novels often feature young people facing extreme situations and emerging more capable because of their ordeals. He is known for a creative blending of bildungsroman with a survival adventure saga that pits a young character against an external force (nature) and an internal struggle (coping with his parent’s divorce, for example, in Hatchet). Additionally, Paulsen’s works attempt to put into words the spiritual sensation of becoming one with nature again and learning to fit into the ecosystem in which humanity has grown disconnected.

Paulsen’s work captures the beauty of nature where the majority of the protagonist’s struggles revolve around problem solving under strained circumstances with limited materials. In Guts, Paulsen explains how he built a bow and arrows as a child in such intricate detail that the description takes up the bulk of a chapter. In Hatchet, each chapter revolves around Brian attempting to solve a single problem, be it food, shelter, water, or safety. For Paulsen, nature is a thing to solve, step by step, and eventually conquer—though conquering nature can only be achieved by finding one’s place within it, not by crushing it.