"Places I have known, creatures I have loved are in Island of the Blue Dolphins..."
             --Scott O'Dell, "Newberry Award Acceptance" Speech, Horn Book, August, 1961
             Scott O'Dell, an award winning author of more than twenty books, was a naturalist who drew on his own experiences as a boy growing up in a rural environment to write historical fiction for children. Born to railway employee Bennett Mason O'Dell on Terminal Island, May 23, 1898, O'Dell spent his youth roaming the primitive coastal communities of Southern California where his father was stationed. His stories are a collection of detailed information of local geography, plant and wildlife gleaned from a childhood spent in close association with nature:
             Wherever we went, it was into frontier country, like Los Angeles. There was San Pedro which is a part of Los Angeles. And Rattlesnake Island (Terminal Island), across the bay from San Pedro, where we lived in a house on stilts and the waves came up and washed under us every day and ships went by...(Commire 112)
             O'Dell spent his days exploring waterways and tide-pools from San Pedro, north to Santa Barbara and his much beloved Channel Islands. His youthful adventures included appropriating Oregon logs from large rafts in the San Pedro Harbor. He and his fellow adventurers would paddle out past the breakwater to the cliffs of Point Firman and
             Portuguese Bend. They became fearless explorers and their logs were transformed into sturdy, dugout canoes (Commire 112).
             His nights were spent in solitary companionship with the sea. In his darkened room on Terminal Island O'Dell would often lie awake, the stillness broken only by the sounds of the moving water beneath his house echoing against the eaves, and the waves breaking on the beaches of far off shores (Commire 112).
             During these years O'Dell also committed a series of sins against the local wildlife that he ...