Gardiner turn it into a book, which he did. In the story, a boy named Willy and his dog, Searchlight, enter a dogsled race hoping to beat an undefeated opponent.Ī producer read the script and suggested that Mr. Originally, he wrote 'Stone Fox' as a screenplay.

got me to enroll in a television writing class, taught by an instructor who didn't give a hoot about spelling and grammar, and my writing career began,' Mr. When he was in his late twenties, his brother Ken made a suggestion. He kept up his writing while working as a contract engineer specializing in thermodynamics for such aerospace corporations as Rockwell International and McDonnell Douglas. He did have one thing going for him, he said. They 'could and did get better grades on their compositions than I did,' he wrote. For most of the other students in the class, English was a second language. Gardiner wrote in an autobiography on his Web site. 'At UCLA, I ended up in dumbbell English,' Mr.

He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in engineering from UCLA. Gardner, who was born in Los Angeles, never read an entire novel until he was 19, although his parents were educators. He lived out his final years with his wife, Gloria, in California and died of complications from pancreatitis in Anaheim, California.John Reynolds Gardiner, 61, whose 1980 children's book 'Stone Fox' sold more than 3 million copies and was made into a television movie, died March 4 at Kaiser Permanente Anaheim Medical Center in California. Gardiner also edited children's stories for television. He took a special class on screenplay and wrote Stone Fox as a movie, but a producer told him to publish it into a novel. He lived in West Germany, El Salvador, Mexico, Italy, Ireland, and Idaho where he heard a local legend that inspired Stone Fox. Always creative, in his younger years he ran Num Num Novelties, home to such originals as the aquarium tie. He was an engineer before working on his first and best-known children's book, Stone Fox, which, at the time of his death in 2006, had sold four million copies.

He earned his master's degree from University of California, Los Angeles. John Reynolds Gardiner (Decem– March 4, 2006) was a writer best known for writing the book Stone Fox.īorn in Los Angeles, California, he was a rebellious boy whose teachers believed he would never get anywhere in life.

Books by john reynolds gardiner