Free The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion by Scholastic, Kate Egan Page A

By the time the third,
Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods
, was published, the series had found a loyal following of readers. The series finale,
Gregor and the Code of Claw
, was a
New York Times
bestseller. With a hungry audience and a growing reputation for fast-paced, thought-provoking stories, Collins was poised to take her next step as a writer.
    Most of her career had been spent in children’s television, writing shows for Nickelodeon and PBS, like
Clarissa Explains It All, Oswald, Little Bear,
and
Clifford’s Puppy Days
. Collins loved writing for young children, and several of her shows had been nominated for Emmy Awards, but she’d long been fascinated by subjects more suitable for older kids.
    In
The Underland Chronicles
(as the
Gregor
books came to be known), Collins had created a complex society that exploded into war. Her readers were mostly in middle school, but she had written genocide and biological weapons into these books. She had killed off beloved characters to explore the cost and the emotional fallout of war. Still, she had more to say about when and how — or whether — war could be justified. In a young adult novel, she might delve more deeply into the subject. While waiting for editorial comments on her final
Gregor
book, Collins wrote a short proposal for a young adult trilogy called
The Hunger Games
.
    Collins found inspiration in several places beyond her TV set. First, in her childhood love of Greek mythology, particularly the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. As part of the surrender terms of a war, King Minos of Crete required that the city of Athens send tribute to him in the form of seven youths and seven maidens. These tributes went into a labyrinth to face the Minotaur — half man and half monster — who would then destroy them all. This savagery continued until the Athenian prince, Theseus, went as tribute to Crete, and killed the Minotaur instead.

    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