(Albert) Sid(ney) (Carl March Fleischman Max Brindle) (1920-)

"While my books rarely draw upon my personal experience," commented author Sid Fleischman in St. James Guide to Children's Writers, "I catch ghostly glimpses of my presence on almost every page. The stories inevitably reveal my interests and enthusiasms—my taste for Josh McBroom devises a solution for the drought so extreme the cows give powdered milk in Sid Fleischman's broadly comic book about the enterprising farmer. (From McBroom the Rainmaker, illustrated by Amy Wummer.) the comic in life, my love of adventure, the seductions (for me) of the nineteenth-century American frontier, and my enchantment with the folk speech of that period. Language is a wondrous toy and I have great literary fun with it." Regarded as a master of the tall tale as well as one of the most popular humorists in American children's literature, Fleischman is noted for writing action-filled adventure stories that weave exciting plots, rollicking wit, and joyous wordplay with accurate, well-researched historical facts and characterizations that reveal the author's insight into and understanding of human nature. He is perhaps best known as the author of The Whipping Boy, a Newbery Medal-winning story that features a spoiled prince and the stoical lad who takes his punishment, and a comic series of tall tales about blustery Iowa farmer Josh McBroom and his amazingly productive one-acre farm. Compared to such writers as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Leon Garfield, Fleischman is praised for his ingenuity, vigorous literary style, polished craftsmanship, and keen sense of humor.

His works, which often draw on American folklore and pioneer history and use backgrounds such as the California Gold Rush, seventeenth-century piracy, and rural life from Ohio to Vermont, are consistently acknowledged for their diversity of subjects and settings. Formerly a professional magician, Fleischman fills his books with mystery, elements of surprise, and quick-witted characters. His young protagonists, who are regarded as figures with whom young readers can quickly identify, often embark on quests, noted Emily Rhoads Johnson in Language Arts, "for land or treasure or missing relatives," where "the heroes meet up with every imaginable kind of trouble, usually in the form of villains and cut-throats, impostors and fingle-fanglers." In his Written for Children, John Rowe Townsend asserted that, like Garfield, Fleischman "is fond of flamboyant, larger-than-life characters, and of mysteries of origin and identity; a recurrent Fleischman theme is the discovery of a father or father-substitute." Although he frequently styles his stories as farces, Fleischman underscores his works with a positive attitude toward life and a firm belief in such values as courage, loyalty, and perseverance. The author's love of language—an attribute for which he is often lauded—is evident in the flamboyant names he gives to his characters, his use of wild metaphors and vivid images, and the colorful expressions that dot his stories. Johnson explains that Fleischman's "words don't just sit there on the page; they leap and cavort, turn somersaults, and sometimes just hang suspended, like cars teetering at the top of a roller coaster." Acknowledged as exceptional to read aloud, Fleischman's works are often considered effective choices for reluctant readers.

Reviewers usually provide Fleischman with a warm critical reception. Johnson noted that he has "produced some of the funniest books ever for children," while Jane O'Connor claimed in the New York Times Book Review, "When it comes to telling whopping tall tales, no one can match Sid Fleischman." Writing in the same publication, Georgess McHargue says that Fleischman "can put more action into thirty-two pages than some authors of 'explosive best sellers' can put into seventy-five turgid chapters." Writing in Horn Book, Mary M. Burns added that although Fleischman's books are expectedly funny, his "transforming setbacks into comic situations and seeing possible triumphs where others with lesser gifts see only disasters . . . [is perhaps] what makes his books so popular." Observing that Fleischman's characters care deeply about each other, Johnson noted, "this, I feel, is what gives his books their substance and strength. To know Sid Fleischman, in person or through his work, is to experience an affirmation of life." In Twentieth Century Children's Writers, Jane Yolen concluded that Fleischman "has made the particular voice of the tall tale so much his own that, if any one author could be said to be master of the genre, it is he. . . . [He has made] highly original contributions to the literature of childhood, at least in this critic's opinion."

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Fleischman was raised in San Diego, California. He credits his father Reuben, a Russian Jewish immigrant whom his son calls "an airy optimist with nimble skills," and his mother Sadie, a "crackerjack penny ante card player," with fostering his interest in storytelling. "My earliest literary memories," wrote Fleischman in Horn Book, "were funny ones. I remember most vividly the woodman's wife with the link sausages attached to her nose in 'The Three Wishes.' That had me rolling in the aisles—or on the living-room carpet. A little later came Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter." Fleischman recalls Aesop's Fables and Uncle Tom's Cabin being read to him by his mother; however, the book that he claims affected him most profoundly was Robin Hood, which he calls "my first great reading experience, and my favorite of those early years." As a minority in San Diego due to his faith, Fleischman developed an identity with underdogs. "I can see this," he told Language Arts, "in the dynamics of my choice of characters to write about. The butler in By the Great Horn Spoon! The gypsies in Jingo Django. And children, of course, are every generation's underdogs." As a small boy, Fleischman developed a strong interest in magic, voraciously reading books on the subject, perfecting tricks to perform, and creating inventions of his own. At the age of seventeen, he decided to write a book of his original tricks, Between Cocktails; published when Fleischman was nineteen, the book was still in print over fifty years later. "When I saw my name on the cover," Fleischman once recalled, "I was hooked on writing books."

After graduating from high school, Fleischman traveled around the country with stage acts—such as Mr. Arthur Bull's Francisco Spook Show—during the last days of vaudeville. This experience, during which he heard folktales and folk speech in small towns throughout America, is often thought to have influenced the improvisational quality of the author's works; Fleischman's son, Paul, himself a Newbery Award-winning writer, called his father "a prestidigitator of words" in Horn Book, while Fleischman referred to his own writing as "sleight-of-mind" in an interview with Sybil S. Steinberg in Publishers Weekly. During the Second World War, Fleischman served in the U. S. Naval Reserve on a destroyer escort in the Philippines, Borneo, and China. In 1942, he married Betty Taylor; the couple has three children: Jane, Paul, and Anne. After the war, Fleischman began writing detective stories, suspense tales, and other pulp fiction for adults, learning, he says, "to keep the story pot boiling, to manage tension and the uses of surprise." In 1949, he graduated from San Diego State College and began working as a reporter for the San Diego Daily Journal. A year later, Fleischman became associate editor of Point magazine, a position he held until 1951 when he became a full-time writer. In 1955, he began a continuing career as a screenwriter when his novel Blood Alley was adapted to film.

When his children were young, Fleischman related in Publishers Weekly, they "didn't understand what I did for a living. So one day I sat down and wrote a story for children and read it to them." This book, Mr. Mysterious & Company, which includes Fleischman and his family as characters, became his first published book for children. Describing the warm relationship of the Hackett family, Mr. Mysterious includes the concept of Abracadabra Day, an annual event where children are allowed to be as bad as they want to be without fear of reproach. "A marvelous institution that may well sweep the country," wrote Dorothy M. Broderick in a New York Times Book Review, while Horn Book reviewer Ruth Hill Viguers called Mr. Mysterious "wholly delightful. . . . It is hard to imagine a child who would not enjoy it."

The McBroom series about the Iowan and his fertile farmland was prompted during the writing of Chancy and the Grand Rascal, a story about a young boy and his "coming-and-going" uncle that Jane Yolen called a "perfect blend of one part quest story and two parts tall tale" in the New York Times Book Review. "For all readers who adore braggadocio and consider Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill the apogee of American humor," Yolen continued, "Chancy and the Grand Rascal is a godsend." While coming up with two tall tales for Chancy, Fleischman was so amused by his initial invention that he turned it into the first McBroom book, McBroom Tells the Truth. Although he did not intend to write another story about McBroom, Fleischman has written a dozen books about the folksy character who entertains young readers with a succession of wild impossibilities on, as Zena Sutherland described it in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, "the marvelous McBroom farm, where instantaneous growth from superfertile soil and blazing Iowa sun provide magnificent crops of food and stories"; in addition to his tales about the farmer and his eleven children, Fleischman has written a compendium of McBroom's homespun advice in almanac format. McBroom's shaggy dog stories are usually considered to be as funny as they are unlikely. In Now upon a Time: A Contemporary View of Children's Literature, Myra Pollack Sadker and David Miller Sadker noted that "Fleischman has created a tall tale hero who delights younger independent readers and also provides a grand vehicle for storytelling and reading aloud." Another of Fleischman's most popular series features the Bloodhound Gang, a team of three multiethnic junior detectives. Based on Fleischman's scripts for the 3-2-1 Contact television show for the Children's Television Workshop, the books are fast-paced, fun-to-solve mysteries directed to middle graders and early adolescents that include short chapters filled with plenty of action. In each book, as Judith Goldberger noted in Booklist, "a neatly worked out plot is based on simple, believable gimmicks."

With The Whipping Boy, Fleischman departs from his characteristic yarns with American settings to write a story, in the words of Horn Book reviewer Ethel L. Heins, in "the manner of Joan Aiken and Lloyd Alexander [that is] set in an undefined time and place." Reminiscent of The Prince and the Pauper and written in a style that harkens back to that of nineteenth-century melodramas, The Whipping Boy describes how spoiled Horace, nicknamed Prince Brat because of his behavior, runs away with Jemmy, the street-smart orphan who takes the punishment for the things that the prince refuses to do, like learn to read. When they are kidnapped by villains Cutwater and Hold-Your-Nose Billy, the boys switch roles; after escaping the scoundrels in an exciting chase through a rat-filled sewer, Horace and Jemmy return to the palace as friends. Jemmy has learned to sympathize with the prince's restricted life and to admire his courage while realizing his own desire for knowledge, while Horace, who takes a whipping for Jemmy, discovers his personal strength and ability to change. "Like much of the author's writing," maintained Heins, "beneath the surface entertainment, the story also speaks of courage, friendship, and trust." Janet Hickman of Language Arts noted that besides "its lively entertainment value and stylistic polish, the story has much to say about human nature and the vagaries of justice." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Martha Saxton concluded, "This is indisputably a good, rollicking adventure, but in its characterizations The Whipping Boy offers something special." Frances Bradburn of Wilson Library Bulletin added, "The importance of education, the true meaning of friendship, and the need for understanding and compassion for all people are enclosed within the covers of this book—but not so obviously that children will find them offensive. Rather, they are such an integral part of the story that there would be no story without them."

It took almost ten years for Fleischman to write The Whipping Boy. The initial idea for the book came to the author from some historical research he was doing for another book. In his Newbery Medal acceptance speech printed in Horn Book, Fleischman said, "I stumbled across the catapulting idea for The Whipping Boy. . . . I checked the dictionary. 'A boy,' it confirmed, 'educated with a prince and punished in its stead.'" Fleischman thought he could write the book quickly, but "after about eighteen months," he recalled in Horn Book, "I was still trying to get to the bottom of page five." Eventually, Fleischman realized the problem. "My original concept for the story was wrong," he explained. "Wrong, at least, for me. I saw The Whipping Boy as a picture book story." One day he read over the manuscript and discovered that his work needed to be much longer: "Once I took the shackles off, the story erupted. Scenes, incidents, and characters came tumbling out of a liberated imagination. Within a few months, I had it all on paper." When told that The Whipping Boy had won the Newbery Medal, Fleischman was elated. "I don't happen to believe in levitation, unless it's done with mirrors, but for a few days I had to load my pockets with ballast. The Newbery Medal is an enchantment. It's bliss. It should happen to everyone."

Following The Whipping Boy, Fleischman published The Scarebird, which contains illustrations by Peter Sis, who has also provided the pictures for several of the author's other works. The story and pictures describe how Lonesome John, whose sole companion is the scarecrow in his yard, slowly makes friends with Sam, an orphan looking for work who comes to John's farm. In her review in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Betsy Hearne stated, "In a period of thin picture books, this has much to teach about the substance of story and the complement of illustration." With The Midnight Horse, Fleischman returns to the adventure story genre with a novel that is, in the worlds of Ethel R. Twichell of Horn Book, "a mixture of tall tale, folktale, and downright magic." The story outlines how Touch, an orphan boy who comes to the town of Cricklewood, New Hampshire—where the entry sign reads "Population 217. 216 Fine Folks and 1 Infernal Grouch"—reclaims his rightful inheritance from his wicked great-uncle with the help of a ghostly magician. "The enjoyment of the book," Twichell concluded, "lies in Fleischman's exuberant narrative flow and his ingenuity in dispatching his scoundrels." A Publishers Weekly critic called The Midnight Horse a "deftly told tale of innocence and villainy."

Fleischman's next novel, Jim Ugly, is a parody set in the Old West that includes such thinly disguised movie stars of the time as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Mae West, and W. C. Fields. In this story, twelve-year-old Jake discovers that the father that he thought he had buried is alive and is accused of stealing some missing diamonds; with his father's dog—which Jake describes as "part elkhound, part something else, and a large helping of short-eared timber wolf"—as companion, Jake and Jim Ugly travel by baggage car from town to town, trying to escape a villainous bounty hunter; in the end, Jake and his father are reunited in San Francisco and the mystery of the diamonds is solved. In Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Zena Sutherland wrote: "Lively, clever, and humorous, this must have been as much fun to write as it is to read," while School Library Journal contributor Katherine Bruner added, "With a little silent-movie piano accompaniment, this rollicking parody of Western melodrama would effortlessly unfold across any stage." With The 13th Floor: A Ghost Story, Fleischman makes his first contribution to the time-travel genre of fantasy literature. In this work, twelve-year-old Buddy and his lawyer-sister Liz are left penniless when their parents are killed in a plane crash. Liz disappears after meeting a client on the thirteenth floor of an old building, and the client turns out to be their ancestor, a young girl accused of witchcraft in Puritan Boston. When Buddy goes after Liz, he is taken by magic elevator to a pirate ship captained by another ancestor and, after being cast adrift, is reunited with Liz, who defends—and acquits—ten-year-old Abigail in court; at the end of the book, the siblings return safely to the twentieth century with a treasure in hand. A critic from Publishers Weekly advised, "Hold on to your hats—there's never a dull moment when Fleischman is at the helm." "An easy, light-hearted adventure," maintained Ann A. Flowers in Horn Book, "yet the author's note also points out the serious consequences of ignorance and superstition."

The Abracadabra Kid: A Writer's Life is Fleischman's autobiography for young readers. Considered as lively and eminently readable as his fiction, The Abracadabra Kid includes Fleischman's personal information as well as his advice on writing; each chapter is introduced with quotes from children's letters to the author, ended with a cliff-hanging episode from his life, and illustrated with black and white family photographs. "Sid Fleischman is a pro," asserted Betsy Hearne in Bulletin of the Center of Children's Books, "and it shows in this autobiography as much as it does in his fiction." A Kirkus Reviews contributor claimed that Fleischman "offers a gold mine of interesting reflections of writing," from one who has "lived adventurously and thoughtfully." Mary J. Arnold, reviewing the book in Kliatt, called it an "engaging memoir that serves as proof positive that writing flows from life experience." For Arnold, Fleischman's autobiographical sketch was "non-stop funny and entertaining." Writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, Candace Deisley commented, "The reader is rewarded with an appreciation for the author's art, and spurred with the desire to read more of his works." Carolyn Phelan of Booklist concluded, "From cover to cover, a treat."

Although more than eighty years old, Fleischman continues to entertain young readers with his raucous tales. With Bandit's Moon, he tells a tale of a Mexican bandit and an orphan girl during the California Gold Rush. Annyrose Smith is left in the care of a man who turns out to be less than honorable. Disguised as a boy, she makes her escape, only to be swept up by the outlaw band of legendary Joaquin Murrieta. Murrieta, it turns out, is badly in need of someone to teach him how to read, and he protects the young girl to that end. For her part, Annyrose is shocked by the behavior of the gang, but then she begins to discover the wrongs that have been done to Murrieta and other Mexicans at the hands of the whites. The plot includes the usual combination of fast pace and twists and turns which Fleischman typically employs; Annyrose slowly begins to be won over by Murrieta, saving his life at various times. In the end, however, believing he was responsible for the death of her brother, Lank, she turns on him. Murrieta manages to escape and slip away—unlike what actually happened to him historically. Writing in School Library Journal, Marlene Gawron called the book "classic Sid Fleischman: a quick read, with lots of twists, wonderful phrasing, historical integrity, and a bit of the tall tale thrown in." For a contributor to Publishers Weekly, the novel was more than just "thundering hooves and gunfire." Fleischman, according to this reviewer, "expertly crafts a fictionalized tale that takes a clear-eyed look at bigotry and racism, while steering away from the twin pitfalls of pedantry and sermonizing." Similarly, Horn Book's Ann A. Flowers felt that Fleischman managed to "clothe issues of loyalty and honesty in a roaring adventure story, smartly written and chock full of humor and derring-do."

Published in 2000, A Carnival of Animals is a compilation of a half-dozen tall tales about the effects on various animals of a tornado that hits Barefoot Mountain. In "The Windblown Child," for example, a strange pink creature is blown in with the tornado; hairless, her fleece has been whisked away to take the place of missing hair on a bald farmer. "Emperor Floyd" tells of a rooster who develops a peculiar affliction as a result of the storm, and in "Stumblefrog," the amphibian in question gets jumping fever after eating the contents of a sack of Mexican jumping beans, torn open by the tornado. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that "the glee with which [Fleischman] relates his outrageous yarns is infectious." Booklist's Gillian Engberg had similar praise for the book of stories, commenting that "as usual, Fleischman writes about the fantastic and absurd with a captivating balance of casual assuredness and precise detail." Grace Oliff, reviewing the collection in School Library Journal, called Fleischman "a master of the tall tale."

Returning to the novel form with Bo and Mzzz Mad, Fleischman serves up another "classic . . . tale," according to a contributor for Publishers Weekly, offering a starred review. When twelve-year-old Bo Gamage's parents die, the youth decides to visit long-lost relatives in the Mojave Desert, separated by a family feud involving a lost gold mine. Arriving in Queen of Sheba, California, Bo finds a town that is little more than an old movie set, and its only residents are said relatives. A former actor in Westerns, great-uncle Charlie, alias Paw Paw, is now a full time grump and tired of life.

There is also an aunt and his cousin, Madeleine, who prefers to call herself Mzzz Mad. These two, of course, discover mutual dislike at first sight. Aunt Juna is the only one to take any interest in Bo; she talks him into tricking Paw Paw with a fake treasure map in order to restore his love of life. The map is supposedly one that shows the gold mine which set off the feud between the two sides of the family. But when some modern bandits arrive on the scene, Bo and his feuding relatives get more than they expected and need to pull together to survive. "The narrative speeds along with enough plot twists to keep readers flipping pages," observed Steve Clancy in a School Library Journal review. A contributor for Publishers Weekly also found the book a "thumping good page-turner spiced with humor, snappy descriptions . . . and a lickety-split plot." The same reviewer felt that Fleischman was "in top form" with Bo and Mzzz Mad. For a Horn Book critic, the novel was "a light-as-cotton-candy concoction," while Booklist's Stephanie Zvirin pronounced the book a "quick, enjoyable read that will fly off the shelves."

More orphans appear in Fleischman's 2003 title, Disappearing Act. Kevin and Holly Kidd have just lost their archaeologist mother in an earthquake in Mexico. Now their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is struck by burglars and they think someone is stalking them. They escape memories and their fears and run off to Southern California, living near the Venice boardwalk and renaming themselves Gomez. Kevin becomes Pepe and takes up fortune-telling on the boardwalk, while his older sister, a fledgling opera singer, becomes Chickadee. They slowly establish themselves in this strange new life, making friends with all the local characters, including a juggling medical student, a human mannequin, a screenwriter with a penchant for bugs, and a benevolent landlady. Holly even gets a role in a production of La Bohème. Then the stalker from New Mexico shows up, and all is put into jeopardy again. Booklist's John Peters thought that Fleischman mixed "themes both comic and serious" in this story, and was able to pull together the manifold plot lines of "his twisty, nail-biter to an untidy, but satisfying, conclusion." Many critics found that the cast of secondary characters was the primary draw in this novel. Betty Carter, for example, writing in Horn Book, wrote that the book "primarily paints vivid character sketches" but "fails to sustain a coherent plot." For Steven Engelfried, writing in School Library Journal, the "characters and the setting are the main draws," though he also noted that "Fleischman neatly frames the conclusion into something more thoughtful and meaningful" than a mere potboiler. And a critic for Kirkus Reviews also praised "the colorful assemblage of secondary characters," concluding, "Realistic fiction it's not, but good, quick, and smart fun—definitely."

"Novels are written in the dark," Fleischman commented in an essay for Children's Books and Their Creators. "At least mine are. Unlike many sensible authors, I start Chapter One with rarely a notion of the story that's about to unfold. It's like wandering down a pitch-black theater and groping around for the lights. One by one the spots and floodlights come on, catching a character or two against a painted backdrop. I sit back and enjoy the show. When the final curtain falls a year or two later, the stage is ablaze with lights, and I have a new novel."