Robert E. Cormier, the author of 18 challenging and critically acclaimed books for young adults, died Thursday. He was 75 and lived in Leominster, Mass.
The cause was complications from a blood clot, said a daughter, Chris Cormier Hayes.
Although several of Mr. Cormier’s novels were translated into more than a dozen languages and three were made into movies, he frequently was criticized for his uncompromising realism.
In The Chocolate War (1974), Cormier told the story of a boy’s refusal to participate in a fund-raising event at a New England preparatory school and the resulting furor that shook the small community.
An interviewer more than a decade later asked Mr. Cormier whether he was “sending a depressing message that even savvy teenagers can’t possibly outwit or buck ‘the system.'” Mr. Cormier replied, “They can buck it, but they can’t beat it.” He said the terrible thing was not to try.
For decades, Mr. Cormier accepted telephone calls from young readers who felt lonely or distraught. They found he had listed his phone number in I Am the Cheese (1977), a suspense novel about a teenage boy’s search for his parents.
Mr. Cormier began to write when he was 12, and soon after, his first poems were published.
In 1948, he began his career as a journalist. After winning awards for his newspaper articles, Mr. Cormier left journalism in 1978 to work full-time on his books.
