Rocket Boys Study Guide

Homer Hickam grew up in West Virginia. When he was in high school, he and a large group of friends—dubbed the “Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA)—collaborated to design a series of amateur rockets. In 1960, their designs won the gold and silver medals from the National Science Fair. (These events form the plot of his memoir, Rocket Boys). Hickam then studied at Virginia Tech, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering. Following his time in college, Hickam served as a First Lieutenant in the Vietnam War, where he was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery. He then worked for NASA as an engineer, designing spacecraft for the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1989, he published his first book, Torpedo Junction, about the history of the American navy. The book was a best-seller, and enabled Hickam to write full-time. His most successful book was his second, Rocket Boys (1998), a memoir about his high school years with the BCMA. The memoir was an international bestseller, and within a year of its release it had been adapted as a film, October Sky, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. In the last 15 years, Hickam has been an energetic author and public speaker, authoring science fiction thrillers about outer space, additional memoirs about his adolescence in West Virginia, and adventure novels set during World War II. He resides in West Virginia.

The most important historical event related to Rocket Boys is the Cold War. Following the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were the only two remaining global superpowers. While the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. never fought each other directly, they competed in various indirect ways.

Rocket Boys is a Bildungsroman­—a “coming of age” story. While there are thousands of Bildungsroman, Hickam’s memoir is a little different than the usual example of the genre, since his “protagonist,” Homer, comes of age by discovering the beauty of science, mathematics, and engineering. In this regard, one close cousin of Rocket Boys is Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Arrowsmith (1925), the story of a young boy from a small town, and his ascent to the position of a respected doctor. Arrowsmith was hugely popular in its time, and is said to have inspired dozens of noted doctors (including several Nobel laureates) to study medicine. Hickam also wrote two other memoirs about his early life and his experiences with engineering: The Coalwood Way (2000) and Sky of Stone (2002).