Edward Packard (born February 16, 1931) is an American author, creator of the Choose Your Own Adventure book concept and author of more than 50 books in the series. The genre that Packard invented, in which the reader chooses what happens, has come to be called “interactive fiction.” Packard wrote many other children’s books as well, and is also a lawyer, essayist, and poet. Born in Huntington, New York, he is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School. Packard came up with the original idea of writing interactive second-person fiction — in which the reader is the protagonist (“you are the hero”) and makes choices that affect how the story unfolds — while he was thinking up bedtime stories for his children. (While telling them a story, making it up as he went along, he would enlist their help by pausing to ask them, “What do you think happened next?”, and they would each have different ideas about how they wanted the story to proceed.) After he published the first three books in this format, originally called "The Adventures of You," Bantam Books offered him and his first publisher a contract for a series, rebranded and made famous as the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children's books. Packard is the grandfather of actor David Corenswet. Biography Early career Packard wrote the first known book of this type, Sugarcane Island, in 1969, and arranged for it to be published in 1976 by Vermont Crossroads Press, owned by Constance Cappel and Raymond A. Montgomery, Jr. Packard explains in the foreword to the book that he developed what he originally called "the adventures of you" fiction format while trying to think up interesting bedtime stories for his three children (Caroline, Andrea, and Wells). In Sugarcane Island, the shipwrecked reader travels around the titular island, making a choice about how to proceed on almost every page (for example, if a reader chooses to walk along the sandy beach, they are told to turn to page 3; if they choose to climb up the rocky hill, they must turn instead to page 5). The possible stories to choose from branch out like a tree within the book; the story that the reader follows unfolds differently depending on the choices they make. Readers confront different dangers or treasures at every turn, depending on their choices. Many of the possible endings feature an unfortunate