'And then I said, 'No, really - if enough other people start to use our new word, then in five or 10 years, frindle could be a real word in the dictionary.' 'Ĭlements went on to use the example in school and library visits for the next few years, before turning it into a three-page picture book called 'Nick's New Word.' Editors told him it needed to be longer, so he expanded his story into a 112-page novel about a bespectacled boy named Nick Allen, who bedevils his teachers by lobbing 'thought grenades' that derail their lessons.Ĭonfronted with a dictionary-obsessed language-arts teacher, Mrs.

'I just made up the word frindle, and they all laughed because it sounded funny,' he wrote on his website. To prove his point, he pulled a pen from his pocket and declared that without anyone's permission, they could start calling it, well, a frindle. It sold 8.5 million copies worldwide, was translated into 15 languages and emerged out of a talk Clements gave at a Rhode Island elementary school in 1990, when he pointed to a dictionary and told the assembled students that ordinary people had invented each of its words.

'I was already a good reader, and I didn't mind who knew about it.'Ĭlements was best known for 'Frindle' (1996), which was rejected by four publishers before being acquired by Simon & Schuster. I confess that I was something of a showoff,' he once said. Jacobs as 'a genius of gentle, high-concept tales set in suburban middle schools,' Clements also wrote short novels such as 'The Landry News' (1999), about an ambitious middle school journalist, and 'The Losers Club' (2017), which featured a bookish protagonist who mirrored a young Clements. Praised by author and New York Times reviewer A.J. That rib-tickling book was appropriately called 'Double Trouble in Walla Walla' (1997). Claus stands in for Santa and a young girl who can't stop using compound words such as nitwit, higgledy-piggledy and itty-bitty. His wife, Rebecca Clements, confirmed his death and said the cause had not been determined.Ĭlements wrote more than 80 children's books, including the text of picture books about a pampered Egyptian cat, an unbecoming fish, a Christmas in which Mrs.

Andrew Clements, a schoolteacher turned children's author whose first novel, 'Frindle' - about a mischievous fifth-grader who coins a new word for 'pen' - was an unlikely bestseller about a kid's power to shake up the classroom, if not the entire English language, died Nov.

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