Birthday: "Whenever I write a story, I hope it appeals to both boys and girls."

Today, The Writer's Almanac reminds us of the unlikely origins of an immensely popular YA series:

Today is the birthday of novelist Suzanne Collins (books by this author), born in Hartford, Connecticut (1962). Her father was an Air Force pilot and Vietnam War veteran. He also taught history in college. “I believe he felt a great responsibility and urgency about educating his children about war,” Collins later recalled. Her father would take her and her siblings to battlefields, and tell them the whole history of the war from its first inception to its ultimate conclusion. His lessons stuck with her.

Years later, with a TV-writing job and a successful children’s book series called The Underland Chronicles (2003–2007) under her belt, Collins was flipping channels on the TV late one night. She was struck by the similarity between reality TV and the coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war,” she later said. “I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way.” It made her think of reading the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a kid. In the myth, Crete keeps the citizens of Athens in line by requiring them to send 14 of their sons and daughters to fight the Minotaur. “The message is, mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you — we’ll kill your children. And the parents sat by apparently powerless to stop it. The cycle doesn’t end until Theseus volunteers to go, and he kills the Minotaur.”

Collins turned that reflection into book series: a dystopian trilogy about a future North America in which young people are forced to fight to the death for their country’s amusement. The Hunger Games — the first book in the trilogy — was published in 2008.