He was a lumberjack and a hog butcher he worked in a paper mill and also as an advertising executive in New York City. In 1958, he married Dorothy Ann Houston, a librarian, and they had two children.īefore Peck became a writer, he worked in a variety of occupations. Afterward, he entered Cornell Law School in New York but did not graduate.

On his return to the United States he enrolled in Rollins College, Florida, graduating with an A.B. Army's 88th Division in Italy, Germany, and France. Peck's high school education was interrupted by World War II, and from 1945 to 1947 he served as a machine gunner with the U.S. Neither his father nor his mother could read or write, and Robert, though the youngest child, was the first in the family to go to school-a one-room school on a dirt road in rural Vermont. His father was a farmer who made his living slaughtering pigs, and Robert grew up working with his father on the farm.

Robert Newton Peck was born on February 17, 1928, in Vermont, the youngest of seven children born to F. A Day No Pigs Would Die has endured for thirty years as a much-loved book because of its simple, direct style, its humor, its emotional honesty, and its ability to authentically recapture a certain time and place in American history. He must endure heartbreak and loss, and he learns to be self-reliant and aware of his responsibilities toward himself, his family, and his neighbors. In the ten months covered by the story, Rob learns many things about life as he quickly grows into manhood. He is thrilled when a neighbor repays him for a good deed by giving him a piglet, which he calls Pinky. The combination of the austere Shaker beliefs and the family's poverty ensures that Rob learns to do without any luxuries in his life. The family adheres to the principles of the Shakers, a Protestant sect that flourished in the nineteenth century but had almost died out at the time the story is set. The story is about a twelve-year-old boy named Robert Peck who is growing up on his father's farm in rural Vermont in the mid-1920s. It is currently available in a paperback edition published by Laurel Leaf. Published in 1972, it was Peck's first novel, and it soon became widely read and admired. A Day No Pigs Would Die is a novel for young adults by the American author Robert Newton Peck.

A day no pigs would die book