Where It All Started

“Children want to write.” This is the quietly stunning sentence that marked the birth of Heinemann. It is, of course, the opening to Donald Graves’ Writing: Teachers and Children at Work.1 “Children want to write” is not the kind of sentence you would expect an award-winning academic researcher to write. There would normally be some hedge, some qualification: “most children,” “children generally.” It is direct, no throat clearing, no background; it ushered in a new style of writing that would be the signature of Heinemann. The Behind-the-Scenes Story of Don Graves’ First Book That Set the Course for Creating Writers