![]() ![]() Before becoming a writer, he taught middle school. Pullman, who has written books for both adults and children, including the Sally Lockheart quartet, numerous fairy tales, and a reimagining of the New Testament, considers himself a storyteller first and foremost. ![]() His novels value experience over the preservation of innocence, though that transition doesn’t come without a cost I can’t have been the only fourteen-year-old to weep over the ending of “ The Amber Spyglass” (2000), the trilogy’s final novel. ![]() Pullman, a lover of William Blake, is famously, ardently atheist. That book introduced one of the most memorable child heroines in English literature: Lyra Belacqua, a scruffy and imperious ward of Oxford’s Jordan College, who is left mostly to her own devices until she is thrust into the complicated business of saving the world from the Magisterium, a shadowy church that wants to do away with original sin. But the English writer Philip Pullman was wise to take Milton as a muse for His Dark Materials, his renowned trilogy, which began with the publication of “ The Golden Compass,” in 1995. “Paradise Lost” might not seem like a promising conceit for a young-adult fantasy novel in which people have animal-shaped souls called dæmons and the fate of the universe rests on the wiles of a preteen ragamuffin and the strength of an armored bear. ![]()
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