Maniac Magee Study Guide

As a child, Jerry Spinelli wanted to be either a cowboy or a professional baseball player. In high school, however, he stumbled upon writing as a future career path when his poem about a championship football game was published in a local paper. He majored in English at Gettysburg College and also took writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University. After writing four unpublished novels for adults, he once again found his path by accident when one of his stories caught the attention of a children’s publisher. As a result, Space Station Seventh Grade came out in 1982, and from then on, Spinelli wrote exclusively for kids. In 1990, Maniac Magee won the Newbery Medal. Spinelli now lives in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia metro area. He and his wife, Eileen, had six children together, and they now have over twenty grandchildren.

Although it’s never stated exactly when the story takes place—which is part of the setting’s legendary feel—Spinelli has stated that the story draws from elements of his childhood in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1950s. Although state-mandated segregation would not have been present in Pennsylvania as it was in the Jim Crow South of that time, it’s obvious from the physical divisions in Two Mills (and the overt racism of some residents) that social attitudes about race could be just as bad here. Though it appears that Two Mills’ schools are integrated, the lives of black and white residents rarely intersect in other ways, and they remain on opposite sides of an arbitrary geographic line, with public places informally segregated. In areas like the greater Philadelphia metro, a policy called redlining—in which African American families, increasingly migrating from the South in search of better opportunities, were denied mortgages in certain neighborhoods—sometimes contributed to the divisions in communities like Two Mills.

Spinelli’s novel Stargirl (2000) is very similar to Maniac Magee in that it features a quirky protagonist of uncertain origin who does acts of kindness for others, leading to ostracism by her community. Another Newbery winner touching on issues of racism and homelessness is Louis Sachar’s 1998 novel Holes. Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) is a young adult novel set in the Jim Crow South. Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy (1998) features an orphaned African American protagonist about the same age as Maniac Magee who faces issues surrounding racism and the search for home.