As a child, Suzanne Collins was struck by the cruelty of the Cretan king, and it stayed in the back of her mind as she
began to construct the country of Panem, the setting for The Hunger Games. Like King Minos, Panem’s cold and
calculating President Snow sends a clear message to his people. As Collins puts it: “Mess with us and we’ll do
something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.”
One of Collins’s favorite movies is the classic Spartacus, based on the true story of a Roman slave. While being
trained in a gladiator school, Spartacus and his mates overthrew their guards and escaped to freedom. Led by Spartacus,
they were joined by other slaves, and the rebellion built to the Third Servile War with the Roman Empire. Like Katniss,
Spartacus followed a path from slave to gladiator, from gladiator to rebel, and from rebel to the face of a war.
Most important, all of Collins’s ideas for the trilogy were steeped in the war stories she heard as a child. Her father
had spent his entire career in the Air Force, as a military specialist as well as a historian and a doctor of political
science. He served in Vietnam when Collins was six, and moved the family between the US and Europe for his work after he
returned. War was never far from his mind, and he had a unique gift for making the subject come alive for his four
children.
The Collins family visited many battlefields, and Collins’s father never shied away from telling his kids what had
happened there. He told them what led to the battle, what happened in the battle, and what its consequences were for the
real people who fought in it and the citizens whose futures depended on its outcome. Other parents tried to shelter
their kids from the idea of war, but Collins’s father challenged his kids to ask questions. What, if anything, made
these bloody battles worth their cost? Collins knew only too well what it meant to wait and worry for a parent who might
never come home.
All of these pieces went into the proposal, which she sent out in the summer of 2006. The three-and-a-half-page write-up
included an overview of the Games and brief descriptions of each book. “Although set in the future,” Collins wrote, “
The Hunger Games explores disturbing issues of modern warfare such as who fights our wars, how they are orchestrated,
and the ever-increasing opportunities to observe them being played out.” She also noted that Katniss, though
“distrustful,” has “a deep capacity to love and sacrifice for those few people she cares for.” The final books have
hewn closely to the original outlines — except for the titles. The original working title for the first book in the
trilogy was The Tribute of District Twelve.
Tributes pay close attention to Atala (Karan Kendrick) during their first day in the Training Center.
On the strength of those few pages, Scholastic snapped up the right to publish the Hunger Games trilogy.
“When I sat down to write this series, I assumed it would be like The Underland Chronicles,” Collins told the New York
Times later. “Written in the third person and the past tense. I began writing, and the words came out not only in the
first person, in the present tense, in Katniss’s voice. It was almost as if the character was insisting on telling the
story herself. So I never really make a concentrated effort to get inside her head; she was already very much alive in
mine.”
The publisher knew it had something special on its hands as soon as Collins turned in her first draft. Editorial
director David Levithan says, “I remember that the manuscript came in on a Friday, and I read it over the weekend. Two
other people read it — Kate Egan, Suzanne’s longtime editor, and Jennifer Rees, an editor who was also working on the
books. On Monday morning, we were dying to talk to each other — it was simply one of the most astonishing things we’d
ever read. Our editorial conversation pretty much consisted of one word: Wow.”
Everyone involved knew the best way to sell the book was to get people to read it. First up were the people in
Scholastic’s sales, marketing, and publicity departments, who were blown away and started off the buzzstorm. Advance
reader’s copies went out and were devoured in one sitting by booksellers and librarians. Scholastic announced a first
printing of 50,000 copies . . . and then doubled it . . . and then doubled it again, as the buzz got louder and louder.
Suzanne’s literary agent, Rosemary Stimola, began selling foreign rights to publishers across the world. To date, it
has sold in 45 territories. When The Hunger Games was published in October 2008, it met with resounding praise.
The first reviews came from book-industry magazines like Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and every one of them was a
rave. Horn Book said, “Collins has written a compulsively readable blend of science fiction, survival story, unlikely
romance, and social commentary.”
School Library Journal agreed, writing, “Collins’s characters are completely realistic and sympathetic as they form
alliances and friendships in the face of overwhelming odds; the plot is tense, dramatic, and engrossing. This book will
definitely resonate with the generation raised on reality shows like Survivor and American Gladiator.”
As The Hunger Games began to climb to the top of bestseller lists, other bestselling authors began to weigh in.
In Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King reviewed The Hunger Games, calling it, “A violent, jarring, speed-rap of a novel
that generates nearly constant suspense. . . . I couldn’t stop reading. . . . Collins is an efficient no-nonsense prose
stylist with a pleasantly dry sense of humor. Reading The Hunger Games is as addictive (and as violently simple) as
playing one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it’s not real, but
you keep plugging in quarters anyway . . .”