work, worked in a lumber camp, in a paper pulp mill, and found jobs playing piano. Peck entered Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont in the fall of 1948. He spent a year there, including a period of work-study in Albany, New York. The following year, he transferred to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida after a football scout, apparently interested in Peck due to his size (6' 4"), urged him to apply for educational funding through the G.I. Bill. At Rollins, in addition to his academics, Peck kept busy with sports, drama, playing piano, and writing. He was known in school for his sense of humor in class and his love of horses. He graduated with a B.A. in English in 1953, and the next fall he entered Cornell Law School. He did not complete his studies, however, due to the lack of financial resources. Following his time at Cornell, Peck tried his hand at several creative endeavors (writing songs and jingles, comedy) until settling into the field of advertising in New York City in 1954. He worked in advertising with Parents Magazine in New York, with Curtis Publishing Company in Cleveland, Ohio, and with American Home Products in New York City, commuting from Darien, Connecticut. He had a record album of satirical music released in 1957, Moth in a Gray Flannel Suit. He left advertising in 1974, following the success of his first novels, and in 1977 Peck and his family moved to Florida where he devoted more time to writing. Writing Peck was steered toward writing by one of his mentors at Rollins College, Edwin Granberry, after Granberry read some of Peck's written work. He published his first novel, A Day No Pigs Would Die, in 1972 at the age of 44. The book, which became a best seller, was written while Peck commuted on the train between his home in Connecticut and his job in New York City. He had published a much less well-known book, The Happy Sadist, ten years earlier, a satirical work which he called "a sort of unprofound autobiography". His body of work comprises nearly sixty children's and young adult titles, six nonfiction works, thirty-five songs, three television specials, and over one hundred poems. His Soup series, another semi-autobiographical work, was immensely popular and ran to nearly twenty separate titles and was adapted for television in 1978. In 2005 he published an atypical