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John H. Ritter (born October 31, 1951, San Pedro, California) is an American novelist, short story writer, teacher, and lecturer. He has written six novels and numerous short stories spanning the historical, sports, and sociopolitical genres in the young adult field of literature. His first novel, ''Choosing Up Sides'', published in 1998, won the 1999 International Reading Association Children's Book Award for Older Readers〔"IRA Names Award-winning Children's Books", ''Reading Today'', June–July 1999: 21.〕 and was designated an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults.〔"John H. Ritter", ''Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults'', 2nd ed. (Florence. Kentucky: Gale Group, 2002).〕 ''Kirkus Reviews'' praised ''Choosing Up Sides'', which attacked the once-prevalent views of religious fundamentalists toward left-handed children, as, "No ordinary baseball book, this is a rare first novel."〔Review of ''Choosing Up Sides'', ''Kirkus Reviews'', March 15, 1998.〕 In 2004 Ritter received the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People for his third novel, ''The Boy Who Saved Baseball''.〔(Retrieved April 15, 2014. )〕 Ritter's novels have tackled subjects as diverse as the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, the complexities of exurban land development, jazz fusion, Billy the Kid, the originations of the racial ban against African Americans in Major League Baseball, and the ascension prophecies of 2012. According to Vicki Sherbert, writing in ''The ALAN Review'' for the National Council of Teachers of English, Ritter "uses the game of baseball, the glory of music, and the power of the written word to illustrate how young people can overcome everyday, and not-so-everyday, challenges. Each book goes beyond the story of the game, beyond the story of the problem, right to the heart of Ritter's message: What is really valuable in life?"〔Vicky Sherbert, "Ahoy, You Crazy Dreamers!" ''The ALAN Review'', winter 2007: 13-16.〕 ==Early life== Born in San Pedro, California, on October 31, 1951, novelist John H. Ritter grew up in the rural hills of eastern San Diego County. His father, Carl W. Ritter, was a sports writer, and later financial editor, for ''The San Diego Union'' newspaper. Ritter's mother, Clara, died of breast cancer, when he was four years old. Ritter recalls, "One thing I remember about my mom is that she sang to us constantly, making up a song for each of her four children that fit our personalities perfectly. So from her, I got a sense of how to capture a person's spirit in a lyrical phrase." Writing in ''Dear Author: Letters of Hope'', edited by Joan F. Kaywell, Ritter had this to say about his childhood. "When I was very young, my mother died. And my father, who deeply loved her, fell into a deep depression and began to drink heavily. After being left with four young children, my dad feared he would not be able to cope. I learned quite early that when a man drinks, he morphs into someone else. I didn’t like that drinking man. I hated the late-night arguments that filled our house, the screaming, the breaking of furniture, and the many sleepless nights I would lie in bed praying for peace, praying that my father could see the pain he was causing, how he was harming his children with his tirades, and driving the housekeepers away. In the morning, sober again, my dad would return to being the gentle, loving soul I knew him to be. And sometimes it would last all day. But never all week. Before long, I’d see his car roll up the driveway, see him climb out drunk and belligerent, and I would disappear. "As time went on, my dad did coach our ball teams, and we did have some great times. He even remarried. But he never stopped drinking. Eventually, his second wife divorced him. His children grew up and moved away. And my dad retired into a dark and lonely house."〔Joan F. Kaywell, ed. ''Dear Author: Letters of Hope'' (New York: Philomel Books, 2007) 153-4.〕 In an essay which appeared in the 2003 book ''Making The Match: The Right Book for the Right Reader at the Right Time for all yawl'', Ritter again writes about his childhood. :"It was right around that time () when a certain black book fell from heaven into my hands and changed my life. An amazing book—full of crazy characters, of sadness and love, of desperation and revolution, of insight and morality. It was political and poetical, religious and surreptitious. It was a biography of the world and it was pure fiction. I was captivated by it, motivated by it, undressed, unblest, and depressed by it. All that summer, I’d been teaching myself primitive piano, had fancied myself a bluesy, outraged rock star or an actor maybe, or anyone with an audience, anyone with a voice. Then on this one particular hot, dry October afternoon, my older brother left for college and left behind his ''Bob Dylan Songbook''. : :"It was long, lean, shiny, and black, a paperback, over a hundred pages full of musical notes and chords and the most surprising poetry I’d ever read. All of a sudden I had a new dream. I tore the baffle off my electric organ, cranked up the tiny Sears and Roebuck mail order amp, and sang that raggedy book from cover to cover, memorizing beat street lyrics, adopting the wail of a moaning man of constant sorrow, a tambourine man, a weather man, only a pawn, only a hobo, but one more is gone, leaving nobody to sing his sad song, and on and on. And I knew what I wanted to be. I would be the storyteller, the historian, the biographer of mixed up, dreamed up characters like these, ‘who push fake morals, insult, and stare, whose money doesn’t talk, it swears.’ Or those who ‘sing in the rat race choir, bent out of shape by society's pliers.’ Characters with eyes, with guts."〔''Making the Match: The Right Book for the Right Reader at the Right Time, Grades 4-12 (Portland, Maine: Stenhouse, 2003) 5-7.〕 Dylan's poems led Ritter to Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'', then to John Steinbeck's ''The Grapes of Wrath'', "and back again somehow—with different eyes—to Mark Twain's ''Roughing It''. All journey books, all road poems, all the manic panic of romance and motion that a country boy needs."〔''Making the Match''.〕 After high school, Ritter attended the University of California at San Diego. There he played baseball and met his wife, Cheryl, who later became an elementary school teacher in San Diego, where Ritter worked for 25 years as a painting contractor while trying to establish himself as a writer. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John H. Ritter」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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