Widely known author, Suzanne Collins, was born August 10, 1962 in Hartford, Connecticut. She spent most of her childhood in the eastern United States. She attended and graduated from Carver High school in Alabama, and continued on to receive a degree in Theatre Arts from the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She also proceeded onto Indiana University, and graduated with a double major in Drama and Telecommunications ("Suzanne Collins"). Collins' career began in 1991 as a writer for television shows, and also began writing short stories. When these short stories became a hit, she began writing novels. Suzanne Collins writes based on her life experience of war, and her understanding of children. .
Most of Collins' childhood was centered around the idea of war. Her grandfather was gassed in World War 1, her uncle sustained shrapnel wounds in World War 2, and her father was a U.S. Air Force Officer who served in the Vietnam War. Due to his career, he was often away, and was gone for a year and half when Collins was 6. This caused the family to move around , so she wasn't able to get settled into a specific town or school. When her father was around, he made sure to explain battles and war situations to Collins', her two older sisters, and her older brother. He was a historian, and it was very important to him that his children understand war. "It wasn't enough to visit a battlefield, we needed to know why the battle occurred, how it played out, and the consequences" Collins states in a recent interview ("Scholastic"). Her father also lived during the Great Depression, so he explained to his children the realities of poverty, starvation, and the reality of war. In The Hunger Games, the first book of the series takes place in an arranged war, in which children are forced to kill one another for entertainment of the public. Collins' used the war tactics her father had taught her to write the battle scenes of the book, making them as surreal as possible.
