Daniel Pinkwater, the cult children’s author whose Lizard Music is headed for the big screen

Daniel Pinkwater

Photo: Cory Doctorow from London, UK / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 15, 1941 Memphis
Occupation	Writer

On a film set this year, Dwayne Johnson sat through hours of makeup to become an old man whose best friend is a chicken. The character is the Chicken Man, a figure Daniel Pinkwater first saw on the streets of his Chicago boyhood and then folded into a novel about a lonely kid who finds lizards playing otherworldly music on late-night television. Pinkwater has written more than eighty books for children and teenagers, nearly all about misfits who wander into worlds nobody else notices, and for half a century he has been the kind of author readers pass from hand to hand. Hollywood has finally caught up with one of those books.

He was born Manus Pinkwater in Memphis, Tennessee, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland, and grew up in Chicago. He studied art at Bard College and then spent three years as apprentice to the Chicago sculptor David Nyvall, who finally told him he would never make it as a sculptor and that he had always thought Pinkwater would be a writer. The name Daniel came later, on the advice of a guru who decided his true name ought to begin with a D.

The first book arrived almost by accident. A children’s book editor he met at a party suggested he illustrate a book. He said he would try writing one himself. The Terrible Roar appeared in 1970 on a $1,500 advance. With his wife, Jill, he ran a dog obedience school in Hoboken, New Jersey, a sideline that produced the training manual Superpuppy and gave him a second home town to mythologise.

The run that made his name came fast. Lizard Music (1976) leaves a boy named Victor home alone with a television that starts broadcasting lizards, and sends him looking for answers with the Chicken Man. The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977) dispatches Arthur Bobowitz to collect the family’s Thanksgiving turkey; he comes home instead with Henrietta, a chicken weighing 266 pounds. It became a television movie in 1984 with Peter Billingsley, Dick Van Patten and Gabe Kaplan. The Big Orange Splot is the picture book about Mr. Plumbean, whose house is splattered by a seagull carrying orange paint, and who answers his scandalised neighbours with a creed that elementary schools in the US and Canada still teach: “My house is me, and I am it. My house is where I like to be, and it looks like all my dreams.”

The novels that followed are where the cult was built. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (1979) rescues a bullied boy through a friendship with a classmate who claims Martian ancestry. Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario (1979), which Kirkus Reviews called “pure fun”, turns a lake monster into a submarine shaped like a giant pig. The Worms of Kukumlima (1981) sends an expedition to Tanzania in search of an intelligent earthworm, while Slaves of Spiegel and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death pushed the same deadpan logic further. Borgel (1990), in which young Melvin Spellbound tours time, space and “the other” with his elderly uncle and a dog named Fafner, may be the purest distillation of the method.

The settings are rarely invented. Pinkwater’s books recycle a thinly disguised Chicago and Hoboken, the all-night Clark Theater, Bughouse Square and the Chicken Man himself, a dignified black man who walked the city with a performing chicken on his head. After Lizard Music, letters arrived from Chicagoans who remembered him. Jewish culture runs underneath everything: Shane Ferguson, from Lizard Music, is named after the Yiddish phrase shoyn fergessen. He wrote for adults too, in the Catskills afterlife comedy The Afterlife Diet (1995), and returned to a Chicago high school in the teen novel The Education of Robert Nifkin (1998).

For many American listeners he was first a voice. Pinkwater was a longtime commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, reviewed children’s books with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday, and hosted his own program, Chinwag Theater. His comic strip Norb, drawn by Tony Auth, lasted 52 weeks; his own website notes it was critically acclaimed by Jules Feiffer and Chaim Potok, “and no one else”.

The strangest chapter came in 2012, when New York State used a passage called The Hare and the Pineapple on an exam for eighth graders. It was based on a rabbit-and-eggplant fable Pinkwater had sold to the testing company, with the vegetable swapped for a pineapple and the moral changed. Questions such as “Which animal spoke the wisest words?” baffled students, and the Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings was stumped as well. A Pinkwater story had been turned into a standardised test, and the test made less sense than the story.

Jill Pinkwater, his collaborator on many books, died in 2022. “I don’t feel grief, I feel gratitude,” he said. The work has continued with the small press Tachyon, which published Adventures of a Dwergish Girl in 2020 and Jules, Penny & the Rooster in March 2025. The second one began, he has said, as “a true story, anyway the beginning of it. Jill wrote a letter, and won a collie.”

Benny Safdie, who directed Johnson in The Smashing Machine, read Lizard Music to his two sons. “We were riveted by its imagination and wonder,” he said when Amazon MGM Studios’ United Artists won the project in a competitive situation in October 2025. Safdie wrote and directs the live-action and CGI hybrid, with Johnson as the Chicken Man, newcomer Theo Clark Leber as the boy, Regina Hall and Alicia Silverstone in the cast, and Jeff Goldblum and Rachel McAdams among the voices. Cameras rolled in August 2026, and the studio has dated the film for Christmas Day 2027. The novel itself has been back in print since a 2011 reissue. Asked whether there is a book he still wants to write, he answered: “The reason I haven’t written it is that I haven’t thought of it, and yes I plan to. Every day I plan to.”

Tags: Dwayne Johnson, Benny Safdie, Lizard Music, children's literature, Daniel Pinkwater, Borgel