American novelist and journalist Robert Cormier, who died in 2000, lived all of his 75 years within a few miles of his beloved hometown of Leominster, Massachusetts. The settings of Monument and Frenchtown in Cormier's I Am the Cheese (1977), Heroes (1998) and Frenchtown Summer (1999), are fictionalized versions of Leominster and its surroundings. His most famous work, The Chocolate War (1974), is heralded as a barrier-crushing piece of young adult literature that shattered the unwritten rules of the time. Cormier's work unapologetically dispensed with the notion that adolescents should be shielded from the more troublesome aspects of life.
