In December 1980, a spokeswoman for Parents for Basic Education testified before a Lapeer, Mich., school board in the hope of banning The Chocolate War, which is aimed at teen-age audiences.

She said the book included "profanity for profanity's sake and there's a very explicit homosexual encounter." This was not the first time the novel by Robert Cormier had come under fire.

The Chocolate War, published in 1974, revolves around the struggles of Jerry Renault, a high school freshman who is trying to decide whether to follow the dictates of the leader of the Vigils, a secret society, or his own feelings. The title comes from Jerry's refusal to participate in the school's annual chocolate sale.

The book has been praised for its gritty, realistic portrayal of teen-age life. In 1974, The New York Times Book Review gave the book a spot on its annual list of outstanding books. Cormier's books repeatedly show up on the best-book lists of the American Library Association and the School Library Journal.

In a recent phone interview with Children's Express, Cormier commented on censorship of his books.

"(The Chocolate War) seems to offend everybody but the young people who are living the kind of life that's in The Chocolate War," he said.

"My conscience is clear because I write realistically."

All of Cormier's books have a basis in reality. The Chocolate War was inspired by a Catholic boys' school that Cormier's son attended. Like Jerry in the story, his son refused to sell chocolates for the school's fund-raiser.

"Nothing bad happened to him, but I used that old writer's question, `What if?' What if somebody pressured him to sell the chocolate, not only students but faculty?" he explained.

"You take reality and then you dramatize it and fictionalize it."

There's a part of Cormier in most of the characters in his books. "That's the beautiful part of writing - your characters can do things you would never do yourself."

As a teen-ager, Cormier said, he "was not much of a rebel except in my heart, and that's what comes out in my books." He said he was more like Jerry in The Chocolate War than Archie Costello, the leader of the Vigils.

"Deep inside me I think I'm still an adolescent, probably."

Cormier also finds inspiration in his four children, who are now adults.

"When my children became teen-agers, I realized that they were going through the same things that I went through as a teen-ager," he said. "I use those emotions (as) the triggers for the stories."

Evil plays a big role in Cormier's books. He explained why.

"When I'm happy, the last thing I want to do is write. I want to go out and celebrate and have a good time. But the thing that drives me to the typewriter is stuff that upsets me."

Cormier understands parents' fear that their children are going to get bad ideas from a book. "I really sympathize with them because when my children were young, my wife and I wanted to protect them from the world, and we watched what they were doing. But we never told other parents' children what they ought to do.

"Where I get angry is when they say, `I don't want my child to read The Chocolate War, but I don't want anybody else's child to read it either,' " Cormier declared.

The critics' charges against The Chocolate War are hard to understand. The homosexual encounter cited apparently is a scene in which two boys are fighting, and one calls the other a "fairy."

As for the charges of profanity, Cormier replies that the language used in the book is realistic. "If somebody hit somebody else with a wet towel, they don't say, `Golly gee' at that age."

"Another thing about censors, they never read the complete book. . . . Out of a 90,000-word book, they object to about nine words, which is very unfair," he continued.

"It's like judging a whole person's body by taking one finger on the right hand and judging the whole body - how tall they are, how much they weigh, and what they look like."

Cormier gets upset with censors because he censors himself. He explained why a chapter he had written for The Chocolate War never appeared in print:

"When my 15-year-old daughter wanted to read the book in manuscript, I took the chapter out because I didn't want to have her offended. And later on I realize that if I didn't want to have her offended, then I shouldn't want to offend anybody else at that age."

Cormier gets hundreds of letters a year from kids who accept his books. Some adults don't accept them because they don't understand the lives of their children, he said.

"They don't hear the language, they don't see the intimidation that these kids are living every day."

Cormier has lived all his life in Leominster, Mass., a town about an hour west of Boston. When asked why he has stayed in the same town, he remarked, "I love the idea of tradition and roots. . . . I love to go downtown on a Tuesday afternoon and meet somebody I was in first grade with."

Cormier knew from a young age that he wanted to be a writer. "I never wanted to be a football star or a movie star. I just wanted to be a writer, and so writers like Ernest Hemingway were really my heroes."

In high school, he wrote for the school newspaper and later became a journalist, although he wrote fiction in his spare time. With the success of The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese, he could afford to quit newspaper work and focus on fiction full time.

Cormier still writes every morning at an old typewriter he has used since "he was a kid in the newspaper business." Late at night, he reworks that morning's writing, adding such things as similes and metaphors.

He added that he likes his work habits.

"It's a nice momentum because then I go to bed with it on my mind, get up the first thing in the morning and write again."

Cormier is halfway through a new novel. His latest novel, In the Middle of the Night, was published in May.

For advice to the budding writer or journalist, he said, "I've met a lot of a writers, and I have never met a writer who wasn't also a great reader. I think a writer has to read the way a ballplayer has to go to the ballpark to practice."

He also believes one should "get in the habit of going to a place and writing every day, whether it's describing an emotion, something that happened to you, coming up with a simile and metaphor for the way you feel or what you observed.

"During my days in journalism, I met a lot of talented people, but most of them never got around to doing it, to sitting down and actually writing."

EDITED BY: Allison Mikkalo, 15.