"My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author"
About this Quote
The wry punch of the line comes from a collision between youthful calling and adult pragmatism. Horror is a comic exaggeration, but it captures a real fear many parents carry: that a life in the arts is a life of uncertainty. For a child to announce a desire to be an author is to choose opacity over a paycheck, a future built on imagination and discipline rather than a predictable ladder. The reaction says less about contempt for literature than about love mixed with anxiety. It is protective dread.
Lloyd Alexander came of age in a mid-20th-century America shaped by the Great Depression and war, where security felt like a moral good. A creative career looked not only risky but faintly irresponsible. He tried safer paths, worked ordinary jobs, served in the Army, and learned languages, yet the pull toward writing did not loosen. The eventual author of the Chronicles of Prydain understood that a vocation sometimes looks like stubbornness from the outside. The statement carries a smile because the story has a happy ending: the Newbery Medal, generations of readers, and the kind of permanence every practical plan secretly envies.
It also reflects a theme that runs through Alexander’s work: the search for identity under the pressure of expectation. Taran, the assistant pig-keeper who yearns to become something grand, keeps finding that true work is discovered by doing, not assigned by anxious authority. The parental horror and the hero’s restlessness are versions of the same tension between order and possibility. To choose authorship is to accept long apprenticeship, abundant rejection, and mastery of one’s own time. It asks for courage and for play, both. Alexander’s amused remembrance honors both sides: the parents who feared for him and the inner voice that would not be quiet. Out of that friction came stories sturdy enough to shepherd other restless readers toward their own undaunted choices.
Lloyd Alexander came of age in a mid-20th-century America shaped by the Great Depression and war, where security felt like a moral good. A creative career looked not only risky but faintly irresponsible. He tried safer paths, worked ordinary jobs, served in the Army, and learned languages, yet the pull toward writing did not loosen. The eventual author of the Chronicles of Prydain understood that a vocation sometimes looks like stubbornness from the outside. The statement carries a smile because the story has a happy ending: the Newbery Medal, generations of readers, and the kind of permanence every practical plan secretly envies.
It also reflects a theme that runs through Alexander’s work: the search for identity under the pressure of expectation. Taran, the assistant pig-keeper who yearns to become something grand, keeps finding that true work is discovered by doing, not assigned by anxious authority. The parental horror and the hero’s restlessness are versions of the same tension between order and possibility. To choose authorship is to accept long apprenticeship, abundant rejection, and mastery of one’s own time. It asks for courage and for play, both. Alexander’s amused remembrance honors both sides: the parents who feared for him and the inner voice that would not be quiet. Out of that friction came stories sturdy enough to shepherd other restless readers toward their own undaunted choices.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
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