Suzanne Collins Books In Order

Publication Order of The Hunger Games Books

Chronological Order of The Hunger Games Books

Publication Order of Underland Chronicles Books

Publication Order of The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Suzanne Collins Biography:

A few great things happened in America on August 10, 1962. As part of President Herbert Hoover’s 88th birthday, The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library was opened. CIA Director John McCone gave warning to President Kennedy that the Soviets were increasing shipments to Cuba, marking the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also on that date, Suzanne Collins was born. Her father was officer of the U.S. Air Force, causing the family to move frequently. However, she spent most of her childhood in the eastern part of the US and her family managed to remain in Alabama long enough for her to attend Carver High School and be a Theater Arts major at the state’s School of Fine Arts. Continuing in that major at Indiana University, from which she graduated, Collins also earned a degree in Telecommunications. Her career as a writer started in 1991, when she began working for children’s television shows. Collins has contributed to the scripts of many well-known shows by Nickelodeon, including Oswald, Clarissa Explains It All, and Little Bear. She also worked for Scholastic Entertainment where she was head writer for the cartoon Clifford’s Puppy Days.

Throughout her career, Collins has won several awards for her work, both for the televisions shows she contributed to and her now very popular sets of books. Her life as a book writer began after meeting James Proimos, a successful children’s author, while working on Generation O!, a show that ran on Kids’ WB. The meeting inspired her to begin her own career as a children’s author. Using Alice in Wonderland as her muse, she crafted The Underland Chronicles, which includes five books. Collins started producing the books in the series in 2003 and continued until 2007. The series became a New York Times bestseller. Then she turned her attentions to writing a trilogy which started with a book called The Hunger Games and also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. It took only 14 months for 1.5 million copies of the trilogy’s two first books to be printed. Keeping in line with her previous successes as a writer and book author, The Hunger Games stayed on the list of New York Times best sellers for over 60 consecutive weeks. Thanks to the success of The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins was recognized in 2010 by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people that year. In addition, Amazon named her the best-selling author of all time for Kindle as of 2012, as she had written a high percentage of the most popularly highlighted passages. Throughout her career, Suzanne Collins has won awards from several organizations, including Horn Book, Publisher’s Weekly, NYC Public Library, NAIBA, ALSC, School Library Journal, and many more.

After writing books consistently for 7 years, from 2003 to 2010, Collins took a short break from writing. However, in 2013 is the release of a brand new book by Suzanne Collins entitled Year of the Jungle which is to hit store shelves in September of the year. Quite different from the trilogy and series that made her a multimillion-selling author, this book is based about her family life as a child. It is inspired by the time spent by her father serving in the Vietnam War. Collins stated that she waited this long to write the story because figuring out how tell it in a way suitable for her young audience was a challenge. She based in off the post cards her father used to send while in service and some of them featured details Collins considered to be quite scary.

A Peek at The Underland Chronicles:

It was The Underland Chronicles that introduced Collins as a powerful children’s author. The series starts off with Gregor the Overlander, which was published in 2003. In the story, two children, Gregor and his younger sister discover that the laundry room of their New York City apartment complex is anything but ordinary. It is actually the entrance to a world called the Underland. This is a world that has no natural light. Instead, it is populated by humans whose skin is translucent, along with several creatures people do not normally interact with, such as rats, spiders, beetles, bats, and giants. All that Gregor desires is to return home with his sister to their apartment in the Overland, but they are kept and go on an epic adventure because the Underland humans find he is the warrior of whom it had been foretold would come and change their world.

The series continues with the second book that was released in 2004. When the story begins, it has been months since Gregor and his sister first discovered the portal in the laundry room and got caught up in the Underland adventure. Gregor is lured back to the strange world after Underlanders kidnap his sister. They have a special mission for him; track down Bane, the white rat. Gregor takes on this task fully aware that there is much at stake for his life, his sister’s life, and Underland.

Collins’ Books Turned Into Movies:

Many fans of the Underland series speculate that it will never be transformed into a movie, to their own dismay. However, that does not mean that books written by Suzanne Collins are not worthy of the big screen. On the contrary, Lions Gate Entertainment raised one their biggest movie budgets ever, a whopping $88,000,000 to make a film adaption of The Hunger Games. The agreement for the movie was established in March of 2009. Collins worked together with director Gary Ross to write and produce the film. They worked to keep the screenplay as close to the original story as possible and fans find the movie very faithful to the book. Before this time, Lions Gate has not earned any profits for the past five years. The movie was released in 2012 and brought in an impressive $125.5 million its opening weekend and has grossed more than $600 million, proving the large budget raised for its production was a worthy cause. There is a second movie based on Catching Fire, the second book in the trilogy, which is set to hit box offices in 2013. Two more movies based on Suzanne Collins books are planned to be released in the coming years.