Since she was brought up in a household where her father and mother were writers, she never saw authorship as something only special people do. She spent much of her time writing plays, poems, and stories apart from all the school assignments she also has to write. Pfeffer did not just sit around hoping to become an author as she embarked on writing. Since that time she deemed herself a writer and worked on becoming one. When she read her father’s name on the published work and hers in the dedication, she was hooked and knew she wanted to become an author when she grew up. As a six-year-old, she watched him work on a book on constitutional law while they were vacationing in a summer cabin in the mountains. He would turn out to be a very large influence in Beth’s life from a very young age. Even though she is a very versatile author, she is best known for writing young adult novels about young women dealing with adult problems that are on the cusp of understanding.īeth Pfeffer’s father was a US Supreme Court lawyer and professor of law at Long Island University. Pfeffer has also written novels for young readers and dealt with similar themes that she does in her young adult works. She won her first award with the controversial title “About David” that she published in 1980. But she persisted and tackling edgy and difficult subject matters such as dysfunctional families, teen murder, sexual harassment, suicide, and runaway or missing children she finally made headway.

However, it would take her two years to sell “Better than All Right” her second work. Susan published her debut novel “Just Morgan” in 1970 and the ease of publishing made her think that writing as a career was easy. Her mother was a secretary and during their visits to downtown New York, they would visit the Metropolitan Museum and the planetarium both of which piqued her curiosity. She had the opportunity to live outside the bustling center of New York but still traveled frequently enough with her mother to the city making for the perfect environmental childhood.

Pfeffer was born in New York City in 1948 and lived with her family in Queens before they moved to Long Island. Susan Beth Pfeffer is a bestselling young adult, young adult romance, and young adult fantasy fiction author from New York. What Do You Do When Your Mouth Won't Open?Īmerican Portraits: Revenge of the Aztecs

Life as we knew it series in order